Athlete CEO #45: The Science of Self-Talk | Athlete CEO: Peak Performance | Josiah Igono & Erik Averill

Erik Averill (00:13): Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Athlete CEO podcast. I'm your host, Erik Averill. I'm the co-founder of AWM where we partner with our clients to unlock the full potential of their wealth for maximum impact. One of our core beliefs at AWM is that the greatest driver of your net worth is actually your human capital. It's what you are going to make an investment in in your own personal development that is going to have that impact on your family, and so once again, we return to our conversation with our good friend, our resident performance psychology master, Josiah Igono. Welcome back.

Josiah Igono (00:52): What's up? Good to be back, man.

Erik Averill (00:54): Man, one of these days, I'm going to have just something that catches you off guard. I always like to make you laugh, but I know the feedback from the listeners and definitely from our team internally of how valuable these conversations are because what we're trying to do is continually develop skills to help us perform at the highest level. Our last conversation about focal points has just been incredible to go in and implement. What I wanted to talk about today was reframing and how powerful this skill can be in helping us optimize and really flourish as people, so maybe just break down a little bit for us what is reframing and we'll launch off from there.

Josiah Igono (01:38): Yeah, so reframing, it's a technique or it's a method whereby we can redirect, right, our emotions, our words in a positive manner to help improve our performance. So many times, we are caught up in just negativity, we're surrounded with negativity. When you're dealing with athletes, for instance, there's a lot of failure involved. There's a lot of hard times, turmoil, and it's very easy when you start studying things like negativity bias and whatnot, we are wired almost to see the negative in everything. Even though it's positive, we see the negative in everything. Those of us who have young kids who are struggling, you know what I'm saying, with picking up their toys or doing homework, or whether you're dealing with yourself as an athlete, as a parent, as a professional, we are wired almost to see this negative hue in everything that we put our hands to, and so reframing allows us to change our words to redirect our actions in any scenario.

Erik Averill (02:52): Two things that I'm reminded, I'm reading the book called Permission to Feel right now and it shares that a lot of that lens through which we're seeing, not only of ourself, is it impacts the way we look at our relationships and everything, so if I've got a negative lens, I'm just going to continue to see the entire world as more negative, which is obviously not ideal. On the flip side, where does this fall in on the positive psychology conversation? One of the things that I would love clarity on is I feel sometimes people are just like, "Just have happy thoughts," right?

Josiah Igono (03:27): Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Erik Averill (03:28): That's not what you're telling me, necessarily.

Josiah Igono (03:31): No.

Erik Averill (03:32): What's the difference between just being a positive thinker and reframing?

Josiah Igono (03:36): That's a great question. In terms of positive psychology and things like that, when you start studying the work of people like Martin Seligman and others in the space, it's very intentional, right? It's ironic because, yeah, it's intentional, however, we're human beings and bad things happen to us, you know what I'm saying?

Erik Averill (03:58): Yeah.

Josiah Igono (03:58): Bad things happen all the time, or unfortunate things, or things that we didn't plan for, and it's okay to have negative thoughts. I'm not here to tell anybody, "Don't have negative thoughts." We're actually going to talk about a technique here later in another podcast about some controversial things that we see in the literature, things like thought-stopping that are playing right into this very question of yours. But when you look at reframing, reframing is not denying that the negative exists. It's not.

Josiah Igono (04:32): I'll give you an example. If I'm a pitcher and I'm struggling with throwing a slider, I just picked up throwing a slider, right, and my coaches, my staff sees that I have high potential to throw a slider and I'm hit-and-miss, right? I throw a slide and it's in the dirt or I throw a slider and I'm just airmailing it, you know what I mean? A common thing that happens with many athletes is, "Man, I can't do this. I can't throw this slider. I can't get it to..." You know what I mean? "I can't get it to... I can't." Reframing would say, "Hey, I'm not denying that I'm having a problem," so I might ask the player, "When you're throwing your slider and it's money, what do you do?" "I have great extension," whatever the case may be, right? Okay, so instead of saying, "I can't throw a slider," you say, "I can do X when I do Y," so, "I can throw the slider for a strike when I get full extension," or whatever the case may be, right?

Josiah Igono (05:42): For a hitter, I work with a lot of hitters over the years, the same kind of concept: "When you are hitting, what are you doing well?" "I'm getting the barrel to the ball." Okay, so instead of saying, "I can't hit right now," you say to yourself, and I encourage athletes to say it out loud because the auditory system is so powerful. Your voice is the most powerful voice in the world, except if God is talking to you in an audible voice, like, "Hey, Erik," you know what I mean? "Clean it up." Your voice is the most powerful voice, and so it's stimulating the limbic system with your behavior, your auditory system, and even your reward systems and just different areas in the brain. That's another conversation.

Josiah Igono (06:26): But when you say to yourself, "I can get a hit when I get the barrel to the ball, I can do X when I do Y," what you're doing is you're reframing that conversation . You're not saying, "I can't do this, this is too hard," you're acknowledging what you can do when you do something else, so there's actually, we hear "process" all the time. "Oh, process this," "It's all about the process," "Process, process." Everybody's slinging around the word "process," but the thing about reframing is that it actually builds in a process-driven action into the words that you're saying, so it's powerful because you're combining the mental, the verbal, and the physical all in one and it's amazing.

Erik Averill (07:12): Yeah. Clearly different than just having happy thoughts. It was helpful to actually hear you talk about, "I can have success X when I do Y," because the other thing that it becomes very real to me is I'm not lying to myself, right? Josiah Igono (07:29): Right, right.

Erik Averill (07:30): That's a huge thing because all of us know, even if you try to just have these affirmations, if you don't believe that, there's not real conviction behind it, and so you're not lying to yourself of being like, "Oh, I can jump 10 feet," when I can't, it's what have you demonstrated success at and what's one of the variables of why that happened and let's affirm that so that we build that pathway, and so I think that that's super helpful.

Erik Averill (08:00): One of the other things that you said that we have to acknowledge is we're humans and we live in a broken world. I think 2020, if you didn't believe that, you believe that now, or you really, really probably need to see a therapist, but one of the things that you had talked about on a previous podcast that was helpful was just even defining the word "psychology," that this isn't a good or bad thing, it's just an acknowledgment that we're human beings, and so I'd love for you just to redefine that for our audience of what psychology is and why we believe so much in building skills as opposed to just only reacting when bad things happen.

Josiah Igono (08:49): Absolutely. When you look at a psychology, it's the study of the mind, right? It's the study of human behavior. For me, I want to take it a step further and say, hey, listen, when you redefine it, I would say that psychology is understanding why certain people do certain things in certain situations, right? Why does the first-round draft pick get to the big leagues, get to the NFL, and is a bust? Why does that happen so many times? That happens so many times, right?

Erik Averill (09:13): Yeah.

Josiah Igono (09:13): There's even a research now that that correlates the higher draft picks with lower performance. Not in all cases, but in many cases. It's crazy. Why does John Doe from Nowhere, America, right, come and absolutely destroy it and just kill it on a major stage? Why does that happen, you know what I'm saying? Psychology allows us to see why people do certain things in certain situations, it at least it tries to, it attempts to. That's the interesting thing about this domain, this field.

Erik Averill (09:45): Yeah. One of the other things that I'm processing as you're talking about is also, the recipe for success is not always looking at what other people's successful outcomes are and trying to replicate that because that's their own unique story, it's their own unique path. You're your own complex human, that you've got to do the work to understand what is the context and the frame and the lens that I currently have. It's one of our first conversations with our clients around money is, "Hey, before I start to give you the solutions, the roadmap of this is what the ultra-wealthy do is let's just have a conversation how you currently think about money," because you have a money map. You have a blueprint that was adopted primarily just from the way that you were raised in the environment that you lived in. A lot of times, our best work can do is just bring clarity to that, and so I would love to hear your thoughts on that, of just evaluating what your current frame is that needs to be reframed. What are some tactics and some takeaways that our audience can hear that they can start to work on this process?

Josiah Igono (11:01): Yeah, I would... It's a great question and I think one of the very first things that I would do is I would try to drum up as much self-awareness as I possibly could, so I would sit down and say, "Hey, as a relates to my vocabulary," because this is all centering around vocabulary, which is a direct reflection of mindset, and say, "As it relates to my vocabulary, my lexicon, my daily talk to myself, what does it look like? Am I generally a negative person? I'm a positive person. Am I an optimistic person? What does that look like?" Then I would take a hard look in terms of people I trust and that people that know me and have my best interests in mind and ask them the same question.

Josiah Igono (11:46): I think that when you do that from your small inner circle and you put on paper your thoughts in terms of where you are in terms of reframing and how it is that you talk to yourself and how you view the world, I think that you'll be pleasantly surprised, or things will be confirmed that, yeah, this is you. Whether that's good, bad, or indifferent, this is you, and I think from there, once you assess where you are, you can make the changes, because face it, some people don't want to change, some people are happy with where they are at, and some people want to get better. You'll hear me say this a lot: Everything boils down to self-awareness, man. Once you become self-aware, at that point, that is when change can happen because you know now that the problem exists.

Erik Averill (12:37): We have a saying around here that says "Own your wealth," right? Josiah Igono (12:40): Mm-hmm.

Erik Averill (12:41): We're big on ownership, which means the buck stops with me, so I legitimately own this company along with my two partners, but it's this Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink, that I think of self-awareness you have to make the decision that I'm willing to start at the first point of accepting responsibility to do the hard work of flipping the mirror on myself and saying, "I may love what I see and I may not like what I see." In the reality, it's probably on a prism, right? Josiah Igono (13:14): Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Erik Averill (13:14): It's on a spectrum of doing that hard work of the self-awareness because to your point, one of the side effects that's actually been insightful of COVID with all these Zoom meetings is they're recorded a lot.

Josiah Igono (13:28): Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

Erik Averill (13:30): You go back and you watch them and you go, "Man, I didn't understand that was my vocabulary. I didn't understand how I came off," and one of the things that has been helpful for me thinking through whether it's me as the owner of a company, whether it's me as an investor or an advisor for our clients, or a father, or a husband, or a friend, or a parent who's asking the questions, what's the energy I want to bring to that room or the relationship and what's the way that I want to make the other person feel? I can't accomplish those things if I don't have self-awareness of how I'm coming off.

Josiah Igono (14:06): Exactly.

Erik Averill (14:06): I think that reverts back to your previous conversations, clarity, who do I actually want to become? Who do I want to be? How do I want other people, not to perceive me so that I can have some facade or to attain approval, but to genuinely have healthy relationships? How do I do that? It's super helpful to hear that.

Erik Averill (14:34): One last thing I want to park on is, can you talk about ...? It's okay if you get a little nerdy here, but legitimately, is our voice really that powerful? Is there something happening in the brain that these affirmations, these verbal conversations, that we should be having with ourselves? I mean, you see a lot of that stuff is waking up and it's a cool Instagram post when you see Dad doing it with little daughter who stands up on the mirror and says, "I am beautiful, I am worthy, I am valued." What's the science behind that?

Josiah Igono (15:08): Yeah. I mean, great question. I mean, words have tremendous impact. We equate a lot of who we are with words that were said to us as children. When it's your voice that's speaking, I believe that it's very powerful because you're talking about integrated systems when you're speaking of something like the limbic system, which is important when it comes to understanding behavior. Your frontal lobe, your amygdala, your temporal lobe, all these areas that are structures whereby not only is it giving us awareness to the outside world, but also within ourselves as well. When you start looking at, for instance, performance or how people are right now as opposed to...

Josiah Igono (16:02): Well, let me back up, I'll say it like this: When you look at an individual and you see their performance, you see how they live, it's like seeing an apple or a fruit on a tree, right? When you see an apple or a piece of fruit hanging on a tree that is not telling the full story. The full story is the root system, right? What is the root system? The root system can be things like beliefs. It can be things like memories, reactions, actions. It can be words. It can be memories. These things all feed into the trunk of that tree, right?

Josiah Igono (16:46): But the thing about it, Erik, is that there's even a root system beneath that, right? There's a root system even beneath that: Modeling, right? What are the things that we saw modeled for us as kids? How did our grandparents, our uncles, our aunts, our mothers, our fathers, how did they respond to certain things, right? Verbal programming is another one. We're talking about words, right? That's a big one, man. Verbal programming, right? What did my mom always say about this situation? What if my dad or my grandpa or my uncles, what did they always say, right, about this type of situation and other areas, like critical life events, right, what thing happened in my life that changed the trajectory of who I was to become? When you start looking at those three things, those three things feed the main root system, which is your actions or your reactions, your beliefs, your political stances, your social values, your morals. Then we finally get to that apple on the tree, right?

Erik Averill (17:54): Yeah.

Josiah Igono (17:54): You asked me about the science behind all of this and I would say that we could break it down even further to those things that we believe, we ultimately end up saying them. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks, so those things that we believe as kids, as juveniles, as young adults, as adults, we end up saying them, and so if you want to change that, not only do we have to go back into the root system, but we have to dig even deeper than that and you'll find those three areas: the verbal programming, the critical life events, and the modeling that we saw as kids, as youth, right? I mean, I know that that's pretty deep, you know what I'm saying?

Erik Averill (18:43): Oh, yeah.

Josiah Igono (18:44): But it's one of those things, whereby your words are very powerful and they are attached to many memories. If we can get that right, or if we can go back and rewire and change and challenge some of those ideas and see if they're actually helping us, man, it is going to set the stage for higher levels of performance and self-awareness.

Erik Averill (19:05): Yeah, I love it. I mean, hearing that fruit analogy, that's really the current frame that we have. I think two things that I have huge takeaways from is it's doing the hard work of the self-awareness. It's also, I think, very important for us is in relationships of also understanding everybody else's lens and their framing is a result of a lot of that stuff, so a world of understanding and of grace, right, a world of before we judge or we attack, maybe do the perception work of why does their frame look that way, why does their lens look that way? You know what, I may be not the way I'm acting, the fruit that's out there. I'm still responsible for it, I'm always responsible for my actions and my choices, but there's some inner work that needs to be done.

Erik Averill (20:02): Super challenging, I think, as a father right now. I mean, this is really what I'm talking about with one of my coaches is, "Hey, there was something modeled in your younger life that made you just realize, 'Hey, you guys, you don't really deal with emotion. You just put it to the back burner, you pull up your bootstraps and we move forward. We get stuff done.'" I don't want my daughter to just get stuff done, and so I think that that was a prime example.

Erik Averill (20:30): For the listeners, I'm excited to announce, as always, Josiah has included some incredible resources that you can start this work today. If you head over to athleteceo.com, completely free, just some resources that Josiah really thinks that everybody should have in their hands to be able to do the hard work to start to talk about what reframing is and self-awareness. We love having these conversations. We'd also love to hear from you. If there's something you would love for us to cover, let us know. Until next time, stay humble, stay hungry, and always be a pro.