In this episode we dive deep into the psychology of high performance with executive coach and psychologist Dr. Sarah Sarkis, whose work spans elite performers in both sport and business.
In a game where the scoreboard never stops ticking, Dr. Sarkis breaks down how great coaches metabolize stress, regulate team friction, and build cultures that turn pressure into flow. From “stress audits” to boundary-setting and recovery habits, this conversation unpacks how coaches can create high-trust environments where teams—and leaders—thrive under tension.
Key takeaways include:
- Metabolizing Stress: Stress isn’t the enemy—it’s fuel. Sarkis reframes stress as something to process rather than eliminate, teaching coaches how to guide players (and themselves) through overwhelm back toward clarity.
- Boundaries and Recovery: The best leaders know when to be on and when to be off. Sarkis highlights how top performers—like LeBron—invest time, not just money, in recovery, reminding us that “all debt comes due.”
- Friction and Flow: Competitive environments are built on friction. Great coaches learn to channel that heat into focus, not chaos—guiding their teams between the edges of boredom and overwhelm.
- Trust and Communication: Micro-cues build (or break) trust. Sarkis explains how consistency and honest communication are the foundation for flow, accountability, and culture.
- Motivation and Meaning: The great motivators don’t rely on speeches—they understand the reward systems that drive human behavior. Motivation, she reminds us, isn’t something you wait for; it’s something you engineer.
This episode is a masterclass in the inner game of coaching—where neuroscience meets leadership, and where the work isn’t just about your players… it’s about your own capacity to lead under stress.
Transcript
Dr. Sarkis 00:00
We look at struggle, but what we’ll look at with a team is, can the coach take the natural friction that’s inside high competitive environments? It’s laden with friction. We call it competition, we call it ambition. We call it a lot of things, but it’s got a friction point to it. And as a coach, you have to learn how to take that heat and sort of guide it into flow versus overwhelm or boredom on either side.
Boredom on one side, to overwhelm on the other and you have to swim this channel. And that takes time and it takes knowing your players.
Dan 02:11
And now, please enjoy our conversation with Dr. Sarah Sarkis. Sarah, we wanted to start with stress and talking about how it can be helpful or giving its correct due with players, with coaches, with your personal life, with all the things that as coaches and leaders, you know, you’re dealing with stress every day, all the time, and your view of stress and how it can be more helpful than harmful when it comes to leadership and player development and all those things.
Dr. Sarkis 02:49
It’s such a great topic. Stress gets like a pretty bad PR campaign and for good reason. It’s very destructive when it is excessive or and our nervous system isn’t trained to manage it. And it’s bi-directional. That impacts us bi-directionally. It’s both inside of us. Stress is how we receive and perceive things and also external. It’s out there life is stressful. It does get this bad PR campaign, but also we have to, and in high performance you see this acutely, we have to learn to live inside of its permanent existence, inside of the game of high performance and really life. There’s really no way to get to that wrong of achievement and accomplishment and bypass daily stress. So the game becomes, the inner game becomes about how you metabolize the stress, how you create boundaries around the stress that you can influence. I didn’t say control. So there’s a ton of ways that we work with stress. We have to control it or minimize it or get it out of our life completely in order to be optimized. That creates like a kind of mindset where you’re sort of waiting to start until you feel ready because the stress is this cue that you’re not ready or that the circumstances aren’t ready. So this is just a great topic for which there’s lots of tentacles for us to dive into.
Dan 04:33
Sure. And the first one for me would be, you know, in sports, there is a scoreboard. And so there’s always that kind of in the background for, let’s say, for coaches and leaders that at the end of the day, there’s a winner and a loser. And that is in the background, I guess, of a lot of what drives coaches and that constant potential stress. And some coaches listening, they don’t win, they may lose their job. When you work with leaders at that level or any level, how you think about how the scoreboard comes into handling stress on a day to day basis.
Dr. Sarkis 05:04
Say more about that.
Dan 05:06
So in a lot of professions, there’s not necessarily on Friday night, your company lost or your company won. For coaches, team A wins, team B loses, and team B may have had a terrific week from a practice standpoint and togetherness standpoint, but they still lose the game. And as a leader, it can highly affect, I guess, your thoughts of the group, how you are as a person or as a coach. And I think there’s a lot of talk in coaching on how to sort of pull back from the score being the ultimate driver of what you do, but it’s easier said than done. So I guess when you’re in a situation trying to work with leaders on taking the scoreboard a little bit out of it or putting it in its proper place, how do you do that?
Dr. Sarkis 05:47
That’s a great question. And I maybe would push back on that outside of sports. There aren’t these scoreboards. There are. We’re all facing this ticking clock that’s on our shoulder. But it is a definition. It is about what does that look and feel like. So inside of sports, there is literally a scoreboard that cues a winner and a loser. I think what you’re touching on here is twofold. One is that inside the coach, who is just a human, even when they’re winning all the time, they have the same hardware that all humans have. So they’re working with the same bandwidth that we all have. So the coaches have an internal reaction to a losing streak. And we can sort of look at that. That’s a really important feature of success is how you metabolize and frame losing and failure and plateaus and stagnation. There’s this myth of linear growth. And we can sort of dig into that. And then I think there’s this other leg that you’re talking about, which is how it then impacts the team. So which one do we want to tackle first in the choose your own adventure? How the coach is impacted or how the team is impacted by the scoreboard? And by the way, they’re connected by a co-regulatory process that’s super valuable.
Pat 07:21
I think we’re definitely gonna move into the team, but let’s start with the coach and how they regulate the stress.
Dr. Sarkis 07:25
So here’s the thing about the scoreboard, the metaphorical scoreboard and the real scoreboard. When it repeatedly doesn’t reflect what you know the demands are on you, which every coach, it’s pretty simple, win. Either win all the time or win less than most of the other team. It’s not like a complicated formula and yet it’s a very complicated and nuanced process, right? So what can happen for coaches and does is they literally have their own imposter syndrome, their own internal reactions to losing. And even for people for whom their mindset is ironclad, it’s a really well-worn practice. And that’s what mindset is. It’s a practice. It’s super important to me that people listening know that the majority of people for whom you see their mindset like as something very enviable, they really had to practice that. They weren’t born that way.
There is a small percentage that seem to just come into the world with that growth mindset on mentality. But for the majority, they practice it, whether it’s conscious or unconscious. And usually it’s both by the time they get to adulthood. So inside of this, they can get very, very rattled, rattled on what it means to be a peak performer who is losing. And there’s a whole psychological process that I would work with in any person that’s really rattled down where identity, that says about an identity, like, but I’m a winner, whatever that sort of identity is, I don’t lose. These kinds of mindsets when they get shaken through the experience of feeling like winning is outside of your agency for whatever reason, we get what we would, in colloquial terms, we will call it an existential crisis. Armchair psychology, we call it an existential crisis. Inside my world, I always talk about this as like, it’s a moment of identity foreclosure. It’s like all these beliefs that you had about yourself, they get calcified and they kind of stop working. They’re like not working for the arena you’re in. And often you’ll find when somebody finds their way to me during a losing streak, which isn’t an uncommon path to find partnership with somebody like me, right? I mean, very few people come to me when everything’s going great and say, listen, I’m at the top of my game and the top of the world. And I know this is impermanent and I should prepare myself for when my identity shifts. Most people don’t do that. Most people come to me when everything has been shaken up and they feel like the sand beneath them isn’t as solid. And that is an opportunity.
And at that place where I would start to engage with somebody is, I guess what I want to clarify here is there’s like short term, I should have said this in the beginning, but the short term in the heat of the moment the game is happening and the clock is still ticking, we would approach this differently. But what we’re talking about here is somebody is aware that there’s a pattern that is invading and eroding their own ability to perform. They are now officially sort of stuck in this sense of like, oh, I don’t know how to get out of this. This is separate from in-game time. They will come to me and the work we will do is around this identity foreclosure.
What you will find dollars to donuts typically, you will find that somebody has an outdated belief that they sort of never upgraded and they’re working on like an old identity of what performance means, team dynamics. And the moment you can help them identify this and you do this through lots of different type of work inside the coaching, which I won’t bore everybody with, and there’s lots of different modalities that you can do this through, people start to self-correct and they see it immediately. Like they’ll be like, oh, yeah, no, I see how this belief I had about my identity, it worked. And now it’s not working anymore. And I’m up against this thing that doesn’t work anymore. So this moment of identity foreclosure, for a lot of people, it’s very disregulating, but for people in my profession, it’s this enormous opportunity where you’re incredibly receptive to change because what used to work isn’t working.
Pat 12:29
Correct me if I’m wrong, what we’ve been talking about is a lot about with their identity, how coaches can maybe start to metabolize stress and framing it the right way to grow. But you also mentioned too at the top, like creating boundaries around stress. And so how would you help coaches create boundaries around stress?
Dr. Sarkis 12:44
Yeah, a lot of times we’ll do like a stress audit. So when you’re really stressed, think of your nervous system as just like totally overwhelmed and inflamed. And what it does, it starts to both generalize and narrow. Your nervous system, including your brain and your mind as part of that, they’re a neuro-efficiency machine. Think of it like a wrestler. It’s so expensive that the things we do with this brain, it consumes the majority of the energy that we spend, statistically speaking. And so it’s just so expensive to run this machinery that in the background, it’s constantly trying to cut weight. Just trying to cut weight, cut weight, get this down to its cheapest form. Being specific is more expensive than being general. So when we’re overwhelmed, we won’t be specific. We’ll be super general because it’s cheaper to just be like everything.
And reefing is a math versus like, no, it’s this, this, and this, right? What I’ll often do is, and I don’t say to them like, well, let’s do a stress audit. It’s not this mechanical, but you listen. And you really like, for me as the coach, I attuned myself to like, oh, they’re not available right now for like brainstorming and problem solving. They need to actually dump, dump it all out of themselves. And I get very quiet. I listen. I empathize. I ask a lot of questions. And at the end, you help them crystallize like, but really what’s overwhelming?
What’s at the core? And you get really specific. And then you have like specifics. And inevitably inside of the specifics, there are things you can influence. Notice I am not using the word control. That’s undesign. Control is an illusion. Influence is possible. No, influence is inevitable. Then you have the possibility of it being positive or you can screw everything. So you have branches on that inevitability, but influence we’re doing all the time by that co-regulation process that I referenced earlier. And so inside of that, your list of your key stressors, there’s going to be ones that we can shelve. We can say, you know what? I think that’s just piling on to a nervous system. Like that’s not necessary. Then we’re going to have the critical stressors that for which we cannot remove and we would not want to remove.
And we’re going to kind of keep those ones right tight in our purview. And then there’s generally other things on our list of stresses that are like existential. But in the moment, we’re not going to deal with the ones that are piling on. We’re not going to deal with the global existential ones. We’re going to take the ones that we can have some agency and influence over. And then we’re going to start to very tactically and practically come up with a plan for each one. And sometimes that plan is going to involve creating new boundaries. A boundary could be a communication pattern. It could be how and when you respond to certain communications. There’s a gazillion ways in which we can start to subtly sort of change the laces where we can influence outcomes, which isn’t everywhere. Can’t influence all the outcomes, but we can strategically certain outcomes. And usually it’s in stages. And when you can help the person get that nervous system less globally inflamed, I am so overwhelmed. Honestly, 9 out of 10 times, they know exactly what to do.
The truth is, I’ve never given anybody that I work with advice that they didn’t know themselves and come up with. They really know all of it. They know what to do. They know next steps. It’s the process that overwhelms them, and the psychological and emotional intensity of the pressure. You can help contain them. It’s really fascinating to see what happens to decision making when we’re overwhelmed. The goal when people are really, really overwhelmed is to tighten and contain the overwhelmed feeling and then helping them get clearer and clearer on the actual places where they do have influence. The other thing about stress is it makes us think we have less influence than we do. Small occasions, it makes us think we have more influence than we do, but that’s statistically less likely. Most of the time, it’ll shut us down. Sometimes, it makes us grandiose. And by the way, we kind of reward that in society. We love when somebody has an overinflated sense of influence. But 8 out of 10 times, you’ll see that stress. It will lean towards shutting people down.
Dan 17:59
Sarah, in talking about boundaries, when you’re working with leaders and coaches, going from good to great, where in their lives or their businesses or their teams do you see the really great ones have healthy boundaries?
Dr. Sarkis 18:13
Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say first, it’s probably nuanced for everyone. There’s a part about what the thing that fascinates me about the people who take it from even great to really fucking great. There’s generally a commitment to the self, to following themselves and their instincts and their deeper level of connection to self.
And I would say often you’ll hear people talk about it in lots of different ways, including flow and all that kind of stuff. So that’s there. So more than just they all do this one thing, is that they’re all so committed to knowing themselves, both the superpowers and their saboteurs, that it’s highly individualized how they get there. But I will say, if there was one blanket thing, is that there’s a capacity to regulate noise and signal. That’s a lifelong process of self-awareness and self-regulation. And you can see why it would be developmental like as kids. We’re much more like all over the place and the noise is right and the signal and rightly so. And then we get to adulthood and we’re supposed to level it out. And I will say that this ratio of being able to be incredibly discerning, consistent and disciplined about when they’re on and when they’re off. And then I want to say something about the off button. The hard cold facts that people don’t love about high performance, although I will say professional sports are better than corporate America with this, is that there is a level of commitment to the recovery side of peak performance. Most people focus all of their energy on the doing, the achieving, the succeeding, the thing, the triumphs, right? We focus so much on that to the neglect of understanding how disciplined these people are with their recovery. Like I thought LeBron James, you know when his big article came out about how much he spends on recovery and wellbeing, I thought he had the best comeback of all time to everybody. Cause it was just so like, I was like, yeah, that’s why he’s him. Everybody was focused on the millions. The headlines were millions, millions, millions that he invests. Notice I said invest and not spends on recovery. And he just said, that’s the problem. Everybody’s focused on the money. Nobody’s talking about the time. That’s time. And he put into his vessel to be prepared for the level of excellence that he expects from himself. I think that that’s a really great thing to remember about this noise signal ratio is that it’s not just noise and signal about when you spend energy, it’s noise and signal about how you recover from the debts of exertion and all debt comes due. There are no anonymous deeds inside of the body. There are no anonymous deeds. All debt comes due. And in youth, we can defer that reality because we have endless energy.
Pat 22:14
Sarah, I’d like to shift our focus on how leaders can influence stress within a group or within their teams, and more specifically, how leaders or coaches should think about putting our players or group in the right kind of environments to prepare them for stressful situations.
Dr. Sarkis 22:32
In some sense, we’ll start where we just left off. I create a culture around this commitment to recovery in the service of high performance. You want your team to perform at their absolute best, especially in an industry where so much is taking place on the road, which is already a physiologic stressor to the body. I would say maybe one of the larger, more than exertion. Time on the road, disrupted sleep, time zones, never being kind of in your own space. These are all added pressures for which you will never, ever change it. So it really becomes about creating a culture, a wider culture, where you have a currency and a respect for the physiologic realities of high performance.
And this isn’t in like a let’s treat them with kid gloves kind of way. This is in the service of peak performance. So all the things you can bake in to the incredibly demanding schedule of your team that will allow them to focus on the fundamentals of recovery. Sleep, nutrition, hydration, human connection. When they can, remember this noise signal conversation, model it yourself. When you’re with your family, be with your family. By the way, encourage the players to do the same thing. So this constant calibration of this noise signal to get extremely disciplined about that. And I’m trying to think of things that don’t cost money. You, regulating your own noise signal ratio, learning to do that as the coach, will have this huge impact from a modeling and culture standpoint, and it’s free. But then there’s tons of things, and teams have this all the time, but there are tons of resources to help the individual players that might be struggling with other. I can’t emphasize enough to the people listening that the players also, these people doing this remarkable thing remarkably well, are just humans. And they are often humans in their 20s. That’s young. The human brain isn’t fully formed till you’re 27. And we’re talking about asking, and in some cases, demanding excellence from not fully formed brains. The other thing I would do if I was a coach listening to this at any level, is I’d start to model exercises of mindfulness.
This is like a whole other summit for us, is to just look at the way that we can use mindfulness, which most people are gonna be like, right, you want us to meditate? Yes. And there’s so many other ways to use mindfulness, alter egos, visualization, guided imagery, rest work. All of these elements that are nervous system based, and they help our nervous system offload and metabolize stress. We’ll never talk about reducing stress, we’ll just talk about metabolizing it. because you have to learn to metabolize it. So there’s just endless ways that we could pick this apart for coaches. And then there’s like much larger structural things you can do. Like I’m often brought in with teams to like work on team flow and that aspect of it, which is really about peak performance. What we were just talking about is supporting peak performance in the non-peak performance moments. How do you create a peak performance culture that honors the physiology and the psychology of peak performance, right? Then when we talk about flow, that’s typically in the moment. As a coach, you can train that and engineer that inside of your team. It often happens naturally inside the game setting as a spectator. And for me, as you know, what I do, you can actually feel it when a team like my son plays soccer at a high school level. And as a person standing on the sidelines who’s skilled in this craft, you can see and feel a team when they sort of like lock in and you’re like, oh, they now they’ve caught some flow, a really interesting thing.
When you see a team that’s sort of locked into flow, there’s four cycles inside of flow. We know a lot. Again, this is a summit, but also highly encourage you. So my colleague who I create a lot of my programming with is this neuroscientist and his name’s Chris Bertram. And I’ve paired with him for like the last five to seven years. And he’s really who I turn to. Notice how I keep pairing psychology with physiology. I’ve never once said it alone as like a separate thing. In the game of stress optimization in the moment, remember, I said there’s short term, like how do we deal with it now and how do we deal with the existential part that’s like longer term in the here and now you will never solve anything psychological with a psychological solution. You have to get in the body. That’s why I noticed I said breath work, meditation, visualization, guided imagery, sleep, nutrition and fueling. These are all like physiologic foundational elements.
So we now know from studying flow, there’s these four cycles and they go like this. The first cycle is struggle. The second cycle is release. neurochemicals are released. The third cycle is flow. And the fourth cycle is recovery. And where you run into problems with teams, when I hear a coach coming to me and basically saying, we can’t get into flow. They say it in different ways. We’re not gelling, we’re on a losing streak, nobody’s communicating, all these different things. And you think, they’re blocked out from flow.
I look at the bookends. How are you metabolizing struggle? How are you recovering from the debts you spent? And flow is incredibly neurochemically expensive. What does that mean? It floods the brain with a ton of neurochemicals that give us this state we call flow, rapid detention, time dilation, both speeds up and slows down. We have an incredible sense of embodiment. I’m one with the ball. We have an incredible sense of interconnectedness. You feel wordlessly connected with the player or the instrument that you are out there with. All of this will ring familiar to anybody who’s had this experience. That’s why I just spent all that time talking about recovery. If you don’t have the neurochemical money to spend on flow, your brain, because it’s a neuroefficiency machine, like I said before, it won’t let you get there.
Dr. Sarkis 29:55
It tries to keep you from going broke. It’s trying to keep you from being neurochemically in debt. So it will make flow harder and harder to get to. So that’s why we looked at recovery. We look at struggle, but what we’ll look at with a team is, can the coach take the natural friction that’s inside high competitive environments? It’s laden with friction. We call it competition. We call it ambition. We call it a lot of things, but it’s got a friction point to it. It’s why games are scrappy. People get heated. As a coach, you have to learn how to take that heat and guide it into flow versus overwhelm or boredom on either side. Boredom on one side, there’s overwhelm on the other, and you have to swim this channel. That takes time and it takes knowing your players.
Pat 30:57
Sarah, I’d like to follow up on the overwhelm piece or the coach kind of manufacturing, managing this friction. You know, you mentioned, I’m sure it’s knowing your team, it’s who the players are, but I guess are there any general guidelines or what coaches should be looking for when the players become more overwhelmed and you start to do more harm than good? Like the friction becomes bad versus it’s the proper friction to help create flow, get the flow.
Dr. Sarkis 31:25
It’s a great question. I would say first is if you don’t have a high trust environment, so as a coach, you haven’t done the early legwork of really knowing your players. Know them. Take time to know them. I don’t mean their position. I don’t mean their player profile. They’re not a commodity. Really know them.
Coach the whole person. How do you do that? You ask questions. You allow for some dissent. You sort of contain. You provide a container for people to show up. By the way, you model communication. Whatever your healthy philosophy of communication is, model it. If you have identified and you work with a coach like me where you’ve identified that you have patterns of communication that are fostering lack of trust and we all have those sometimes fix them, address them. These aren’t little things. We call this inside of the world of developmental psychology. These are called micro cues in that world of co-regulation that I talked about. In the world of co-regulation and micro cues, deeds, not words really matter. So inside your team, people are constantly assessing like, are you full of shit? Are you consistent? And nothing erodes trust more than detecting bullshit.
The bullshit detector in all of us is inside of a group of three or more is highly attuned. This would make sense. We’re constantly trying to figure out where do I fit? How do I fit? Where’s my position? Am I safe on this team? So as a coach, the first thing is do the hard work. It’s like building an atmosphere and an environment and a container where trust is unequivocal. It’s the main ingredient. And while it sounds soft and fluffy, I’m not going to like hijack the rest of this conversation on the tiny ingredients inside of trust. But suffice it to say that we know exactly the ingredient list inside of trust and you can intentionally put those ingredients into your team. The key word here is intentional.
You have to first believe that trust is a primary ingredient inside of peak performance. And if you do believe that, then that’s your first step. It’s like, okay, I have to build trust, to build a group identity. And then I have to coach to that group identity there. So once you get trust, then there’s things you can do, both practical, like tactical and practical, like simple things. Music goes a long way. Also in any practice, bake in a period of struggle. By the way, that’s why mindset is so important as a coach. It is important that when they are struggling, instead of pausing and get your act together, this is part of it. Use it as a fuel. Use the frustration as a fuel. Encourage them that this can be a portal in. Help them believe that frustration and struggle are part of their greatness and that if they keep at it, there’s lots of other… I mean, that whole identity, but there’s essentially like low triggers that you can infuse systematically and strategically so that you increase the likelihood that the team will get there.
Dr. Sarkis 35:16
And the more you practice it and make it a cultural theme of your performance motto as a coach, as you get super clear on that, what’s your performance motto? What is your belief about how you will influence and bring out greatness in the five players on the court?
And then you play with it. Like any kind of art, there’s a science behind it, right? We could do a whole session with Bertram just on the science of flow, but how you get it to show up as an art. So if you’re curious about it, every great coach who’s really curious about it, over a season, you can make it really intentional. Like, I’m going to try to really get built at coaching to group flow. And it just happens. It’s an emergent state, neurochemically, in our brain that we can manufacture with effort and intention.
Dan 36:18
Sarah, this has been awesome so far. I know we could just keep going and going on this topic. We do want to slightly pivot now to a segment on the show that we call start, sub, or sit. We will give you three different options around a question, ask you to start one of them, sub one of them, sit one of them, and then we’ll discuss your answer from there. So Sarah, if you’re set, we’ll dive into this first one. Hey, love it. Okay. This first one has to do with players or people that are tough to handle after failure. So I’m going to give you three different actions or things that someone might do after failure. And then your start here would be the one that as a coach or leader, you’ve got to be most mindful of, like that can be really detrimental to your culture. So here’s your three options. So start, sub, sit. The first option is if the player isolates themselves or emotionally withdraws in some way. The second option is if the player becomes indifferent or apathetic to what you’re doing, just not caring. And the third option is the player or person begins to blame others for failure. So the three options and the hardest to handle be your start here. The three options are players that isolate themselves or withdraw emotionally, become apathetic or indifferent, option two, or blame others, option three.
Dr. Sarkis 37:35
Okay. You didn’t give me any layups here to stay talkable. Yeah, it’s great. I love it. Okay. So the one that I’m going to start, which is an interesting way to phrase this. So I’m going to start the most difficult one to handle, meaning if it ran amok, it’s the most malignant. Yes. They’re also malignant. I’m going to start blame, but it was a photo finish behind indifference. This apathy is a particular malignancy that is really dangerous. Everything else has traction that you can get to. It’s got a pain point, but indifference reaches a place that’s numb, really hard to engage numbness. So this was a photo finish. Sub is who would I put in next? I think I’ve described.
Dan 38:28
Yeah.
Dr. Sarkis 38:28
So, I would put indifference in, and I have some caveats to this here game a little bit, okay? Yeah. And then isolate self, mostly just because the other two are so squeaky, isolate, I would sit. But even then, because you never want to match when you’re dealing with complexity inside of like a personality style, the sort of overarching theme that I would tell coaches is don’t match the worst underbelly capacity of the personality archetype, so an isolator, don’t match it. So sitting them, some are benching them, somewhat isolates them even further, so you’re like a little bit matching their tendency, which is not a great style.
But nonetheless, indifference and blame are so malignant. See, isolators, by nature of isolating, they also isolate their malignancy, they are withdrawers. So I would probably, from a psychological standpoint, I would leverage that they are less immediately malignant. Their risk is like they create silent objectors, rogue factions that sort of form quietly in the outside that are in your blind spot. You don’t fully see them, that’s an isolator’s risk. But a blamer and indifference, it can quickly take over the team morale.
Dan 40:01
Great answer and we recognize this game is always tough in the fact that they’re all three difficult.
Dr. Sarkis 40:06
We’re obsessive people. Yes.
Dan 40:09
within all this, how much if this problem arises and you’re working with a coach or leader, do you look at the coach dealing with the person, so the player one on one and their character, who they are as a person versus really looking at the environment that they’ve created around failure so that these things come out?
Dr. Sarkis 40:29
It’s going to be pretty obvious to me. So I should say, first of all to like teams that I work with, there’s something I like to do that I learned from this very particular style of method that I was trained in in grad school called the Tavistock method and I adopted it as I started working in more complex environments, which is that if I’m going to work with you as a team, I have to go and embed myself inside your team for like a couple days. If I could take an invisibility pill, that’s the only way I could like improve this scenario.
Because the moment I enter a situation, I change it and that’s a proverbial lie. It’s not because I’m magical, it’s because humans influence when they show up somewhere. So the moment I’m there, who is she? No matter how much I try to stay invisible. I like to just observe the team in multiple settings. In this case, it would be practice, it would be team meetings, it would be games, but I’m just there almost like a spectator. So for me, diagnostically, after that I have no further questions. None. I’ll know precisely, very clearly what’s emerging in terms of, is it a culture of blame? Is it an individual situation? Is it a temperament style? Is it from management? Is it from coaching? Is it from ownership? Where is the cultural leak? Then at the cultural level, it’s actually in some ways easier. You have the influence, like once you get them clear, oh, you know, diagnostically, you don’t necessarily have a player who has a malignant blame problem. You actually have a culture that’s sort of allowing people who end up blaming. That tends to actually be easier to work with. And then sometimes these players show up with their own life, their own life experience, their own temperament, their own mental health. The whole thing is like they are their own people and you will find temperament hiccups in there. And when it’s an individual situation, you have to coach to that as well. And then you have to simultaneously make sure that you’re reinforcing that the environment has, in a non-punitive way, a zero tolerance for it.
Pat 42:57
Sarah, I thought you said something really interesting with the isolators and that we as coaches shouldn’t match their isolation. If we look at like a practice environment and the player reaches failure and we see they begin to isolate, it could affect the next several possessions or even worse, they like pull themselves out and we shouldn’t be matching their isolations. I guess what we tell a coach to do is that we need to force them to struggle through it. How would a coach cope with an isolator when we start to see it expose itself in practice?
Dr. Sarkis 43:28
It’s a hard thing to manage because these two polar opposites, one is never pursue a distancer. When somebody is backing up, do not go toward them. We know what animals do when they are backing up. And you are not reading their micro cue that they don’t want you to back them into a corner.
So at the one hand, you have this really strong instinctual thing like, ooh, never pursue a distancer. And the other hand, you don’t want them to go off and isolate because they will not be able to perform that way. So what I would generally advise in that situation with coaches is you praise publicly and you seek greater clarity privately. So I’d probably approach that player. And really from a place not of like, what the hell is wrong with you? We need you. I’ve more like been around you a ton. And I’ve really started to understand when you’re here and when you’re just here, but not here. And really try to seek to understand, first of all, do you see and feel that? Yes. How can we work together on this? You want to succeed as much as I need you to succeed. And you’re succeedable when you’re here. I just need you here, present, right? And there’s, in terms of coaching, that’s a place where you could call in a performance coach like a me, like a Bertram. These people who, and I’ve got, if somebody’s listening, I get a list of people that I think do really meaningful work in this way. But it’s likely a nervous system thing. When they’re overwhelmed, they sort of click the off switch. Remember to auto regulate. Remember that the nervous system is constantly trying to cut weight. So you have a couple of reasons that somebody would totally withdraw like that. And bringing them into the conversation often shows an isolator, OK, I see that you’re gone. See that you’re here, but not fully here. And I’m not here to accuse you. I’m here to be genuinely curious how we can help with this. How can I be part of the solution? And usually, you can bring isolators out that way.
Dan 45:47
You mentioned like when you go into a group and you’re there and you feel the environment, how important it is then if there is a blamer or someone that becomes indifferent, how important is the who? Meaning there’s 15 players on a team, certain players have more voice, certain players have more pull, knowing if this player has a blame problem, it’s really going to affect the rest of the group versus a lighter voice or the group dynamics that you need to really be aware of to know if this one or two people have this problem or in deep trouble versus other things are fixable.
Dr. Sarkis 46:19
So it’s a great question. It’s very astute to understand that social influence, which is what a group gives us. Many a time, I’m grateful. It’s a pressure. It’s closing in like this, like a pressure chamber, the social influence. If you’ve ever had an adolescent or been one yourself, you know that feeling. But it does a lot of the dirty work of change that is tedious, because we have this enormous drive to conform at an unconscious level to fit in, even those amongst us that have a high drive for autonomy. Ultimately, we have to have a pack to make it in the world, but not just on a team. But in the world, we need packs. It’s bi-directional. It brings up a broader thing. So when I work with clients, if they’re the leader, and everybody’s a leader at some level inside of a team, but one of the first questions I’ll ask is like, who are you leading? And oftentimes, you get like demographics. It’s like nothing about the person. So it’s bi-directional in that, first of all, it really matters as a coach that you know your players, whether it’s with me or somebody like me who really understands psychology. Like, take time. I joke about it with my people as we have one-page dossiers on everybody’s nervous system. One page, super simple to remember. You spend time understanding it, and you kind of know immediately like, oh, I’m OK. This person idles at 85 miles an hour. This is what they do when they’re overwhelmed. So there’s like a one-pager that like, this is what I do, is how I remember anything about anybody, right? It’s like, they have a dossier in my mind that helps me very quickly allow them to feel seen and heard. Because now I’m specific about them and their nervous system, their psychology. So they’re like, oh, OK, she’s talking to me specifically.
This sounds like me. And I have a little cheat sheet on kind of blind spots, plot holes to avoid, land mines to avoid, because you have a little bit about the person. So first is like, spend time knowing your players. Coach to the whole player. Know them. The second is that there is a pecking order inside of any system that has rank. They’re the conscious and an unconscious pecking order. And any time there’s movement inside of that pecking order, there’s friction. They incredibly attune and receptive ecosystem inside of teams. And we know immediately. We know in our body. And we sort of cognitively know. Somebody might piss us off later. You realize like, oh, I was pissed off because I could feel them moving up the rank. And I wasn’t. That’s jealousy. That’s envy. That’s competition. So there’s all this stuff. So in there for feedback, it does matter also who delivers. If you have to address that you think a player is a chronic blamer, it’s wise to know who’s tightest with them on the team. Who are they most receptive to hear from? Who would absolutely tank this delivery? When there’s a ton about sequencing feedback. When do you deliver it? In what environment do you deliver? Certain players love to be sort of called out in front of other people. They need a little bit of spite to kind of get their wheels, get some traction under that struggle phase and others shut down entirely. It could be incredibly sort of sensitive, porous people when they’re in flow. They’re incredibly attuned, locked in. But out of flow, they’re sensitive, maybe even a little bit ornery and complicated in that way.
You’d want to know all of this. And once you kind of know that, you know, teams are fluid and humans are unpredictable at our kind of base. So it’s not that mistakes won’t be made, but you’ll be able to say like, hey, sorry, I screwed that up. Like, hey, by the way, it’s not for lack of trying. Like I’m given a ton of effort and intentionality. I’m not always going to get it right. Super sorry, I pissed you off. You know, let’s work through this. People just want to know that you’re really thinking about them. You’re not just loving a coaching theory down their throat. So that’s how I would sort that out with somebody.
Dan 50:49
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Pat 51:38
So our last start sub sit for you, we’re calling this when language is at a premium. And so we’re going to give you three examples when the language coaches use is the most valuable and could have the most impact in framing, whether the team grows or the player grows or the team backslides player backslides. So scenario one is right after a loss. Scenario two is in a high pressure situation, in a timeout at halftime, kind of in the moment. Scenario three is during a skill development session, trying to develop a player. So those three scenarios start would be when the language is at the most premium and can have the most influence.
Dr. Sarkis 52:23
I know I just promised to be quick, but this one’s so nuanced because it depends how you deliver the message. So I’ll give you a concrete example. In the heat of the moment, nine out of 10 times, I’d say you got to be so skilled at that in the heat of the moment because you can shut them down in that heat of the moment. But when you’re highly skilled, you’re sort of like an art to motivational coaches that just can bring motivation out in a clutch moment. Then I would say if you’re one of them, do that.
It’s almost like you have to know your style. What is your superpower as a coach? But let’s play it out. Let me not be a nuanced subject matter expert and let me just play this game like I’m cool. Let’s try this again. I would say if you’re skilled at the art of motivation, do it in the heat of the moment. If you aren’t, I would make debriefing a real cultural commitment of the team right after, but in a non-threatening way.
It can be solo, group, and right after could be like the next morning. It doesn’t have to be 10 minutes after, but really looking at a post-mortem is super helpful. But again, the mindset really matters around it because that’s what you’re coaching is the mindset, the receptivity of the information, not really when it’s delivered. You’re really coaching their nervous system, so see previous comment about the dossier. It’s super dependent, but I would say if you’re talented, then do in the heat of the moment, then I would say sub, debrief, and then sit, skill development. Even though I’m not saying skill development isn’t so important.
I think of the skill development, the practice side of it as like the drum beat, it’s there consistent regardless of the melody, how it goes up and down, winning and losing. You keep that skill development like a drum beat that they just consistently rely on, and then we start or sub immediate or heat of the moment or debrief.
Pat 54:44
What do great motivators have in common?
Dr. Sarkis 54:46
Oh my gosh. Okay. This is a summit which we really should tackle. I think a lot of people don’t totally understand the human motivation system, how it’s tied into all those neurochemicals, the physiology, and that while it sounds very complicated, it’s actually quite intuitive and remarkably simple. Once you’ve been intentional about really understanding how it operates inside of humans, both individually and as a team, and I would say the really great ones have been intentional about it, or they’re highly intuitive. And by the time they get to me, I realized that much of what they’ve done has been run on gut and underneath that gut instinct is such a fund of knowledge about how you reward and reinforce humans. And that’s really what motivation is. It’s about how do you leverage the reward and reinforcement patterns that humans lean toward? And how can you influence that both at the individual level and at the team level? Motivation is fascinating. And most people think you have to sit around and wait for it, and you don’t. So it’s one of my favorite topics.
Dan 56:09
The great ones that you work with, what does a good reward system usually look like for a group?
Dr. Sarkis 56:14
One of the things we do when we’re looking at like, how’s your team operating and where do you want to take them? You’re going to get clear, where are we steering the ship? By the way, we’re steering it toward where you want to go, not where I think you should go. I don’t have anything to do with where your destination is. I’m committed to the process. You tell me where we’re headed.
I might push back. I might say, I think that where you’re headed is, it’s a short-term gain and I think long-term, you’re going to regret that. Are you open to hearing why? And they may say, no, I’ll go, great, steer toward the iceberg. I’m here, I’m inside far, right? Or let’s, oftentimes they’ll be like, yeah, now they have, well, here’s why. In general, I think you have to be very intentional about where you’re steering your ship. And if you aren’t, the reality is if you’re not, sometimes you’ll get great players who will carry you, okay? There’s a lot out there about how individual, great players don’t make for great teams. And we get a lot of examples about that historically. There’s something else, there’s some other magic that comes together. And if you’re not intentional about how you reinforce and motivate, you will end up at the mean, which is average. You know where you’re going to go if you’re not intentional about it and how does it look? Well, it’s different for everybody where they’re steering. But when we think about rewards and reinforcement, it’s very different than punishment. So sometimes you see high pressure. They have this environment where they think they’re motivating people, but actually they’re just sort of punishing and humiliating people into the compliance they want. It’s just very different. And you can construct.
Dan 58:01
Sarah, you are off the Start, Sub Sit hot seat. Thanks for joining the show. We have one more question for you before we close the show.
Dr. Sarkis 58:17
Thanks for having me.
Dan 58:18
So our final question that we ask all our guests is what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career?
Dr. Sarkis 58:24
In myself. That’s the best investment I’ve made over the years in understanding myself, in really trying to understand human psychology. I picked psychology in college of the 23-year-old idiot. And I didn’t know necessarily what I was picking. I just thought, I like this, but that investment changed my life. So it’s the best thing that I’ve invested in. Are there more anchoring things in my life, like my family and my partnership and my children and all of that? Yes, there are. But in terms of what I’ve invested in myself and my deep sense of curiosity has been my superpower.
Dan 59:17
Alright Pat, wow. We love these conversations. I think you and I can increasingly find ourselves being drawn to these kinds of conversations on the podcast. One, because they’re just so interesting. I think both personally and then when you relate it to your teams, Sarah was awesome and can’t wait to dive in his recap.
Pat 59:33
The whole topic around stress and performance is so nuanced. So it’s always fun bringing someone on like Sarah, like we had CC Kraft or Dr. Gio-Valiante. We can probably talk about the same subject with all of them and we’ll hit on different parts of it and have different conversations every time, all equally interesting. So it’s always fun to kind of get into the nitty gritty of these kind of psychological mindsets and how it can help coaches themselves and navigate their teams. So really enjoyed the conversation today.
Dan 01:00:01
Absolutely. Well let’s get into our top three takeaways and for number one I’ll throw it to you. you
Pat 01:00:06
Yeah, so I’ll start with our first bucket. I thought we had a tremendous conversation from stress and then it got into like flow States. I’ll start with the stress aspect, particularly when we were talking about how coaches can manage handle metabolized stress. I really liked the conversation as we went from metabolizing stress to creating boundaries around stress.
I thought she gave a great analogy of like a wrestler trying to cut weight and let the nervous system when we’re stressed, we feel overwhelmed. We’re very general and that all the body is trying to do is just shed it off. And looking at just trying to crystallize the core of what really is stressing and whittling it down yourself, taking kind of an inventory and getting like the clear list of stressors that you have as a coach actually have agency over and can influence. And then from there, allowing you to create the healthy boundaries. And I thought she gave great points within like the healthy boundaries. And I think you asked a great concept on from the good to great, what the great leaders are able to do. And she mentioned regulating the noise and the signal, noise versus signal, being able to discern, be consistent and discipline and knowing like when to turn it off. And that went into then another great conversation about recovery and not only as coaches, but then kind of when we looked at the team to how recovery plays such a huge role in creating an environment that can handle and manage stress.
Dan 01:01:27
Yeah, like she mentioned, there’s life stress, there’s job stress, all that kind of stuff. And I think it’s obviously particularly interesting for us as we’re heading to the seasons and the stress level overall for every coach everywhere. And I’m out of the level just ramps up from practice to games, travel, all of it. And so like a good time to talk about this, of course.
I liked she mentioned and she doubled down on, we talked about performance that we often try to isolate either mental performance or physical performance. And that she said like they’re so connected. And she a couple of times mentioned psychology and physiology are deeply interrelated. And so that’s why it’s so important to give heed to both things. And so I really like that. I’ll also double down. I love the boundaries talk. And I think like over the course of this podcast, some of the great coaches we’ve had on have had a real sense of their own personal boundaries and then create boundaries within their program and create boundaries outside of their program. And I think that’s a real art and skill that comes over time. But also like she mentioned, you have to be mindful of it and work at it.
Otherwise, you’re just going to have this constant, like she mentioned, the fraying on both sides. The stress is just going to keep closing you in and you’re not really going to know what to be stressed about versus not being specific. I think she mentioned some good stuff about you’re more broad when you’re super stressed and trying to figure out what to narrow in on. And I just take that away as coaches, we have so much coming at us every day from all different standpoints. And the really great ones kind of have that boundary area. And then I’ll just also say, I really liked the flow conversation too. And going back a little bit, you mentioned Dr. Gio Valiante we had on, we had some discussions about flow in that conversation with Dr. Gio, which was awesome. I think we got into it from a different lens today with Sarah and really fascinating. I think as coaches, it’s like a sweet spot of how do we get our teams, our players into it. But then she had great points about intros and outros and how much time you got to spend on stuff at the beginning and in the end. And it’s great when you’re in the flow, we want to work on that. But the bookends, I think she mentioned was the quote, how important those bookends are.
Pat 01:03:43
And to your point, one of the bookends was struggle. I mean, we talked a lot about recovery, but then when we got into the struggle and the role friction plays, creating friction within a practice environment, create that struggle, which ultimately leads to flow. That was another part of the conversation that stood out to me, and just like how to understand when that friction is healthy and serving the purpose it’s intended for versus like starting to overwhelm too much friction. I thought she had really good thoughts on just creating high trust environments. The role that communication plays and their pattern of communication and allowing that trust to flourish or disintegrate, and then creating the mindset within the struggle, just reinforcing, this is good for us. This is why we’re doing it. This is gonna lead to growth, but just encouraging to stick with the fight within this friction, within the struggle, knowing on the backend that it’s gonna bring your team to the flow state, but growth in general.
Dan 01:04:32
Absolutely. It’s like our podcast. We try to get to flow about 30 minutes in, about half an hour of us clunking questions before it finally clicks in. The guest struggles with us.
Pat 01:04:42
Friction between you and me trying to figure out those questions.
Dan 01:04:45
Yeah, before we move on to point two, really quick miss on my part from the podcast, not by Sarah by any stretch, but just because we can’t talk about it all. I would love to bring her back or I would have loved to gone deeper on the decision making and the stress part of in-game versus out-of-game.
And in coaching, you know this, there’s like two different people. You can be great with handling stress off the court and preparing for practice and handling all the things that a coach needs to handle before the game. And then when you get to the game and those 48 minutes are just, it’s like a different thing. The clock, the score, the time, the situational stuff. It’s like a different skill set that is wrapped into this whole thing of coaching. And I would have loved to picture brain a little bit deeper on some of the in-game stress management thoughts, decision making habits of the greats. I think she would have great thoughts there too.
Pat 01:05:43
It bleeds a little bit into your first follow-up question about in practice pregame, there is no scoreboard, but when you put that scoreboard up there with the environment, exactly like it changes the whole dynamic and how you handled in that new situation, I’m with you. I think that would have been a fascinating conversation.
All right, Dan, we’ll keep it moving here. I’ll throw it to you for the second take-away.
Dan 01:06:04
I’ll go to my start sub sit, which was the tough player to handle after failure, the isolator, the apathetic or indifferent player, or the blamer. The fun conversation in general, I think that what’s fun about this conversation is we can probably all immediately think of one or two players on our own roster that is subject to this.
Pat 01:06:25
How do you think we came up with this question.
Dan 01:06:27
Exactly. So like it’s attributable like right away to your roster. And I liked when asking about what she would do, like how she can know if she goes into your group for 48 hours, she can know whether it’s a person or a cultural thing. And like, are you setting up a culture that again, the mindsets and handling failure that is it a blame people culture? Is it an apathetic culture? Like, I think that was a cool part of it to the person versus the environment.
I also really liked talking about the isolator and I don’t want to steal your thunder, but, you know, someone’s distancing to like not necessarily pursue that person to let them distance for a little bit and figure out another way to come at that person. She doubled down. I think you and I both felt it’s so important right away immediately, the blamer or the indifferent apathetic player, it’s got to be handled immediately because it can really tailspin your group bad directions. And I think she doubled down on all within our own ways. We have to figure that out.
Pat 01:07:26
So I think in the most simplistic terms is like know your players Spend the time to know your players and I think you can start to like identify these problem areas Quickly piggyback on the isolator what she said don’t match their isolation, you know, don’t pursue a distancer Maybe a miss on my end or a follow-up miss was when we did talk about it I think it all starts and of course like the identification trying to solve it through the practice when these mistakes these Behaviors can happen and you can work through it, but it is a really interesting with the isolator in a game When it is they fall into that habit and you don’t want to isolate an isolator But you obviously can’t sabotage the next two to three possessions in a game Yeah, you know, maybe coping mechanisms or how you try to work through an isolator when it’s actually occurring in the game Maybe the answer is that yeah in that case you do have to hold them out and then of course have a conversation on the bench Again, I think it all boils back to this is why you have to know your players have conversations work through it You can’t be surprised in a game repeatedly and not address it in practice So I really liked her thoughts with the isolate trying to praise them publicly trying to kind of assure their value within the group I helped them be aware I think she said can you see it and feel it like asking them to kind of again identify Make sure they’re aware building the awareness and then working through their conversation But the whole conversation really for me like to just enlighten dealing with different player personalities I did like last point I’ll make here and I think was your fault the social influencers the group hierarchies and that movement within the group Creates that friction being aware of it as a coach and kind of you know understanding what is going on within the group
Dan 01:09:05
For sure. I just agree with you on, I think, her talking about the friction that’s needed to enter a flow state. Also played in here where creating friction in practice before you get to game environments, obviously, of course, is so helpful because then you can kind of see players’ personality traits before you get to the game and to know how to try to handle them. So you’re not going to get to a flow state just by accident.
You’ve got to really put them through these environments to know like, oh, these two players tend to kind of blame or isolate and you can work through it. And then lastly, Owen Eastwood, one of our favorite conversations we’ve had on the podcast talked about the lions, the wolves, and the sheep within your culture and that was a little bit in my mind when I asked that follow up about who it is and if you’ve got some of your wolves or your lions, like people that are like more boisterous and have influence within your group if they’re blamers or isolators or different at times, like it can probably quicker pull your group in a bad direction. So group dynamics, of course, is a fascinating subject to itself. So we could have gone on for a long time, but let’s keep moving and go to our last takeaway and I’ll throw that back to you.
Pat 01:10:16
The last takeaway I’ll go to our last start subset and the role that language plays in critical moments when language is at a premium. And I think the takeaway has to be with the conversation kind of morphed into or settled around was like the art of motivation.
So like just trying to learn like what the great motivators do, whereas maybe some commonalities within it, knowing your reward, the reward systems and how you reinforce it, I think was like the big takeaway within the art of motivation. And knowing your players, knowing in the performance model where you’re trying to steer the ship and kind of always pointing in that direction.
Dan 01:10:53
Yeah, I thought the motivation part was really interesting down kind of the end. She had a quote about the drum beat of your program and then the wins losses, all this other stuff is kind of what goes in and out. And that, that was a nice quote.
I thought of Brittany Loney on her podcast. Brittany just spoke at our coaches summit a couple of weeks ago. It was awesome. And in Brittany Loney’s conversation, you talked about after action reviews and the after-loss stuff that Sarah was talking about today and how important that is, whether it’s right after or whether it’s the next day. Like really important for great leaders to have a, an after action review as Brittany Loney would call it, or just some way to recap and ask questions and grow, I think was a good part of that as well.
And then the last takeaway she just mentioned, like you said, intentionally steering the ship. It doesn’t have to be the speeches all the time. It can be just the way, you know, your players and a word off to the side or shooting with them after practice or whatever it is that these master motivators can do it both in a group setting, but then I think in small groups or individual setting too, I think she was getting to his it’s everywhere and it’s like a, its own huge bucket as well. Pat, we both kind of sprinkled in some misses, not by Sarah, of course, but stuff we could have gone deeper on. Was there anything else from your standpoint?
Pat 01:12:05
And the last start subset, she mentioned that great players doesn’t always translate to great teams, would have loved to have followed up on that. I think we’ve all seen it.
I mean, we continue to see, you know, great players that are on losing teams, but just that dynamic, the great players versus the great teams, I thought would have been really interesting to follow up on.
Dan 01:12:23
Yeah, I’m right now halfway through a book that’s been recommended by a couple of fellow coaches called The Captain Class, and it goes through the history of the best teams ever. And yes, they have talent, but the best players doesn’t necessarily, well, obviously the best teams.
Once again, we thank Sarah for coming on for such a great podcast today. Thank you everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Pat 01:12:49
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please make sure to visit SlappingGlass.com for more information on the free newsletter, Slapping Glass Plus, and much more. Have a great week coaching, and we’ll see you next time on Slapping Glass.