Full text of psychologist Jonathan Fader’s talk: Win the Game of Life with Sport Psychology at TEDxRutgers conference. In this talk, he shows how to use the techniques of sport and performance psychology to win at life.
TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. Jonathan Fader – Sport, Performance and Clinical psychologist.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here today.
So it’s a little strange up here. You’re on, like on the spot literally, and it’s really natural in that moment on the spot to feel your heart race, to have your thoughts go wild. It’s really natural to feel that pressure, the pressure to deliver an idea worth spreading so natural.
But I’ve got a confession to make. I’m not actually that nervous. I’m going to tell you a secret about why.
You see I’m a sport and performance psychologist. I should be able to do this. In fact, I’ve spent the past 15 years, basically my whole career working with high professional high level athletes in the NFL and MLB, with the fire department in New York City.
But today, I have a really special opportunity. I have the chance to share these techniques, ones that helped me with you here today.
But first, just a little bit about what it’s like to be a sports psychologist – working in the NFL, working with MLB:
It’s been an amazing pleasure and it’s been just so fascinating and honor to work with these high performance athletes, but it’s also been really humbling and it’s also been stressful.
We stress out about things. Like, for example, when I went with the New York Mets to the 2015 World Series, I can remember sitting there on the sideline really feeling like I should just be there in the moment, but I was distracted. I was worrying:
What’s going to come next? Are we going to win? Are we going to move on? Are we going to advance? What’s going to happen to the players that I care about here?
We all worry. We get in our heads in a lot, right?
If you worry about things, relationships, the climate, the political state, your life… If you worry, let me hear you say ‘I do’. It’s natural to be human, but there are things that you can do to get better at dealing with those thoughts in our heads.
And I’m going to teach you how athletes do it today.
But first we have one task and that’s really to understand the nature of being human all here together. So in order to do that, I need to go on a little ride with you guys. If you’re ready, let me hear you say “I’m ready”.
All right, everybody stand up. Yep. You’re in the right place. Ready? Here we go. If you’re ready to feel what it’s like to be a human, I want to hear you say ‘dance’.
(Music)
Let’s go. Come on. Let’s go.
[read more]
You want to continue? I love it. All right, everybody just give me a second. Everybody, you can take your seats. It’s hard to see with the lights, but I was able to see three well-known dances. Here they are:
The full commitment. (Does dance gestures) You guys are ready for Saturday night.
But then there was this other dance. It was like the, does this count? Does this count?
And then there’s a third dance, the most famous dance of all the one we’re doing all day long. Every day, everyone in here is doing it. It’s this:
Am I being judged right now? Who’s watching me? Am I good enough? I’m in my head right now.
Natural, it’s natural to be that way. As humans, our central nervous system developed to be that way. As we were evolving over 600,000 years, we had to notice one thing: the predator, the tiger, the lion, that’s how we had to notice the negative thing. We had to notice it, or we wouldn’t survive. We wouldn’t evolve.
But as a high performance athlete and yes, you and me up here on this Red Ted dot, we have to learn ways of dealing with the fact that we’re always in our heads, always worried about what’s going to come. Always worried about what’s to be.
And I’m going to teach you some of those ways. We’re going to talk about it together, but first:
How do athletes condition themselves?
Well, we know about how they condition itself. They do things like jump rope, right? Physical conditioning, they lift weights. Certainly they do that. But over the past 15 to 20 years, there’s a new field that’s developing mental conditioning.
So the things that we do with athletes are things like mental rehearsal, imagery, to rehearse what you’re going to do before you get there in your mind. Super effective, researches show.
Also we help people to get in touch with their internal motivation, their why, and to remind themselves of that.
We help athletes to talk to themselves in an adaptive way; self-talk. And we also focus on our breath and on breathing.
But you can’t go to the gym to do this kind of work. In fact, there’s no weight that you can actually pick up to do this kind of work.
In fact, there’s one weight you must put down to really do this work well, it’s this one, you got to put it down. This is actually my phone. And to remind myself, to get into the moment; to be in the moment, I have this word (moment) on my phone because I need a reminder I’m human too. I forget.
I get caught up in worry; caught up in thoughts about what’s going to happen with this talk… What’s going to happen in my life, in my relationships? And most of us in this room can certainly relate to that feeling.
So it’s about paying attention to the moment. So how do you do that?
How do you pay attention to the moment?
I want to tell you a story about how I learned it the first time I paid too much attention to the moment.
These right here are my hippie parents. Yeah! Give it up for my hippy parents. I love them so much.
And one time I think about hippy parents, you see is they’re not that great at locking their bedroom door. So I go over to the bedroom door. I’m like seven or eight. And I open the bedroom door and I walk in on them. They’re there, they’re breathing. They’re meditating. And it starred me.
I mean, I wanted to put that away. My parents were weird, right? They’re so weird. They’re doing this thing. This mindfulness meditation. It’s so strange. I don’t want to tell anyone about it. No one. I want to hide it away. Hide it away, never tell anyone.
Until about 15 years later, I’m going to the university of Washington to get my doctorate in psychology. And I get there and I meet these luminaries; these professors in the field of psychology. And I go to this faculty meeting as a graduate student.
And I go and I open the door seeking to see the people that are going to teach me everything about performance, about managing stress, about psychology. And I open the door and they’re meditating.
I was shocked. What?
And I had to confront at that one moment the thing that none of us in this room, none of us should ever have to confront, that my parents were right all along.
You might say, “Fader, okay, you do this meditation yourself. You do with NFL athletes. You do with MLB athletes. You do with firefighters. But you know, maybe that’s just for your hippy parents. It’s not for me. ‘Mindfulness meditation’, is that really what an elite athlete is going to do when the game is on the line, someone who’s at the best of their field. Are they really going to do that, I wonder.”
You don’t have to wonder.
(Plays Video Clip)
So what does LeBron James arguably the most talented, active basketball player of our time? What is he doing in that moment? He’s (meditating).
Now, here’s another question for you: Is this the first time that LeBron James has done this?
No, he is doing mental conditioning. He’s working on his mindset all the time. So when he gets to the moment that counts, he’s going to be ready. Just like we can. We can work on our mindset. We can train our brain using performance psychology and sports psychology techniques to be ready for that moment when it comes in your life; your big date. Some of you the way you were dancing, [indiscernible] tonight.
Your interview, your test, your meeting, this is one of the ways to get there. But you might say, “Listen, Fader, he’s an athlete. My life’s not a game, right? I got things on the line here. I have real life problems. You know, it’s not real life.”
I say, “Tell it to these guys.” These are my colleagues at the FDNY and it’s been a tremendous honor to work with them, to help, to develop the mental performance initiative, where we teach firefighters, 11,000 person firefighting service of FDNY, how to use these techniques to be in the moment more.
And that’s Jason Bressler on the left. That’s me in the middle and Chief Ginty to the right. And really what we work on is helping them to learn those techniques. Self-talk breathing. So they said, “Fader, listen, you want to come work with us. You got to come. You think you’re Mr. Mental toughness, come work with us.’
So they call me. And they just call me up and said, “We need you to come today to the rock.”
I’m like, “The rock. How do I get to a rock? Do I swim? Like, how does this work?”
It turns out the rock is a training center in Randall’s Island in the middle of the East River, New York. And they light buildings on fire. And they actually have real purposeful practice to train firefighters.
So they bring me in. They have, they put on the bunker gear here. And I went in and I was really prepared. But when I got into this burning building, the thing I wasn’t prepared for was the thing that’s most lethal in a fire: smoke.
I got in there and the smoke hit me. I couldn’t see anything. It was really frightening. And I had my oxygen on. They told me like, “you don’t want to just rip that oxygen mask off. It’s an instinct.” And I was like, “No, that’s not going to happen.”
Of course it did. All of a sudden I got in my head, started thinking, my heart started racing. But I had two things in my head, from the work I do with athletes to help get me back into the moment. One was breathing. And I’m going to teach you how I did it right now.
If you’re ready to learn it, say “I am”.
So what we do to keep our breathing in control is we breathe four seconds in four seconds out. And a two second pause. Inhale for four, exhale for four, two second pause.
We’ll start in the count of three. If you’re ready let me hear you say “I’m ready”.
One, two, three:
Inhale to one thousand and three, one thousand and four, exhale to one thousand and three, one thousand and four. Pause.
Inhale to, one thousand and three, one thousand and four, exhale to, one thousand and three, one thousand and four.
Now you have something to go to in those moments, in those fires in your life. Tough discussion, can go to your breath. Tough meeting, can go to your breath. Test, you can go to your breath. Game, you can go to your breath. Ted talk…
That breathing… that self-talk helps me in all different areas of my life. When I said when I was in that fire, the way I was talking to myself was I was just saying here and now to help guide myself back to the present moment.
Here and now, in any moment that you’re in. And working with NFL players, it’s funny because you know, they’ll just grab you in the locker room. So an NFL player grabs you, it’s kind of like; you’re like one of those stuffed animals in a crane; you know, in the amusement park and come up and grab it, “Fader, that breathing technique that you helped me, that you showed me, It was really helpful”.
And here I’m like, “Wow, actually am good at my job. And I’m like, wait, I’m trying to go back in the plays that he was involved in. And which one is he talking about? Which one did I help him in?”
(Player) “Yeah, Fader. See I was with my wife and I was about to get in an argument and I used your breathing technique and it helped calm me down.”
So once I got over the little ego blow that it wasn’t about football. I realized one of the most powerful things that I’m talking to you guys about these techniques are for all of us. We can all use the same techniques that athletes use in their life to be the best in the field, in all of the different situations where we experience stress and pressure.
My belief really is that life is a sport, in the sense that we’re playing a sport or we’re giving a performance. When we’re playing chess, when we’re playing violin, all these beautiful moments that we have, we don’t endure it. We don’t try to get through it. We play it. We’re really there.
And the techniques of mental conditioning of sport and performance psychology, breath, meditation, and mindfulness, self-talk, mental rehearsal can really help you. They’re the ones I wrote about in my book, ‘life as sport’, in which I tell people, you all and try to share with you what’s really been helpful for me to be on all the red dots that I have in my life, both personal and professional.
But the word I used was play… to be playful. And I want to just come back to that for just one minute.
What I do is I bring something to every teen-talk I do when I work with an NFL team or an MLB team or any corporate event or whoever I’m talking to in academia with doctors, I bring this Bingo Ball, except I call it the Ball of Death.
And what I do is I say, this has all your Jersey numbers in it. And I’m going to pick someone at random and that person can come up on stage with me and freestyle rap in front of everyone.
Can you imagine? Or come up and tell a joke in front of everyone. I mean, that dot moves from six feet to being throughout everyone here, but I don’t want to talk about it. I actually decided that we’re going to pick someone here at random to come up here and freestyle rap with me upstage. Just come up here.
We’re going to put seat numbers here. Those doors are locked. Can we lock those doors? We’re going to pick someone here random to come up and rap on stage with me. So three lucky people, your numbers are on your seat. Just let’s make sure you check your number right now.
I’m just kidding guys.
“Oh my God.” Right? “Oh my God. Oh my God. Not me. Not, I don’t want to touch that dot. There’s a predator. There’s a lion. Get it away, get it away.” Right. That is stress.
And the more you use these techniques for every moment, not just freestyle rapping, not just when you’re on the field of play, but it’s all a field of play. Life is a sport.
I feel bad. That was mean. Does that mean? Who said, ‘oh my God’, that was me. Right.
Okay, you know what? I think I owe it to you guys to freestyle rap. What do you think? Like, I mean, I actually, I really put you on the spot. Terrible, right? And I owe it back to you guys. So when in the last kind of minute here, I just want to give you guys something which has to be playful.
So I just need it from the front rows here, a fruit. Okay, Raise your hand. Yes?
Someone in Audience: Mango
Fader: Mango, okay.
[Fader does freestyle rap in front of audience]
I hope this talk gave you good feel…
Let’s take the mango peel…
Leave that fruit… Take the loop…
Oh my god! it’s not on mute..
This is happening right now… Come on… how?
I’m talking about breathing exercise…
If you do it then you’ll wise,
Oh yeah! Maybe you surprise
So let’s do it together
Everybody, if you’re in it all kinds of weather…
Oh my god! It’s time to stop
[Imaginary Mic Drop]
Guys, this is the sign in New York Giants locker room. Let’s stay in the moment and let’s do it together. I invite you to begin to live life like a sport. Thank you.
