Think like a winner: performance psychology and lessons for everyday life

Sana Qadar: Stan Beecham knows what it takes to be a winner. And he had one client who had the unfortunate habit of just missing out over and over again.

Stan Beecham: So I'm working with an athlete who came in and this is a US competition, came in second four times but never won.

Sana Qadar: That would be heartbreaking.

Stan Beecham: Yeah, because the research says that coming in second place is much worse than coming in third place.

Sana Qadar: Yeah, I've read that.

Stan Beecham: If you, if you get if you get a bronze medal and you come in third, you go man, at least I got a medal. If you, if you, if you get the silver medal you're like, shit, I could have gotten the gold.

Sana Qadar: Yeah, totally.

Sana Qadar: So Stan is a sports and performance psychologist, and his clients are top athletes and CEOs.

Stan Beecham: I see this a lot with golfers where they stay somewhere between the top 25 and top 50 in the world. And if you look at it statistically, you're talking about, you know, tenths of a point. So what what I'm trying to get that person to see is they are complicit. Like they were comfortable being second. And there's nothing wrong with being the second best person in the country at what you do. But coming in second place is not something that happened to you. You were involved in creating unconsciously. Now, okay, I'm not blaming the person, but you have to understand that you accepted your role in this thing. And so it's really hard to convince yourself that you deserve to be the best.

Sana Qadar: That feels a little bit harsh with that athlete who came second four times to say you had a role in that. Because what if what if you just wasn't physically as able to do it?

Stan Beecham: Well, if you want to take something like a say, a race that takes 15 minutes to run, okay, and you beat me by two seconds, is that physical or is that mental?

Sana Qadar: Mhm. That's, that's true. Yeah. It's not a whole lot difference.

Stan Beecham: Yeah it's not. The fact of the matter is statistically there's an insignificant difference between being first, second and third in many sports.

Sana Qadar: Has an athlete come first yet since starting to work with you.

Stan Beecham: Yeah yeah. And and and set a couple of American records.

Sana Qadar: This is All in the Mind I'm Sana Qadar. Elite athletes operate on a whole different level.

Stan Beecham: Number one is their weird, unusual people. They're not the norm. They're generally very physically gifted, which they did nothing for.

Sana Qadar: And they're also obsessed with what they do.

Stan Beecham: And it is the most important thing. Not their kids, not their wife, not their church, not their God. Their sport is the most important thing to themselves because that's where they spend most of their time.

Sana Qadar: Now, most of us aren't like that, and we probably wouldn't want to be because.

Stan Beecham: If you live their life, you'd be miserable.

Sana Qadar: Oh God, are most of these athletes you work with miserable in some sense then?

Stan Beecham: No. They're just obsessed with what they're doing. It's their whole life.

Sana Qadar: But even if you don't want to be exactly like them, there are some insights and techniques you can learn from how top performers think that can help you in your own life. So over the next two episodes, we're going to hear from two sports psychologists, Dr. Stan Beecham and Dr. Jonathan Rhodes. Both work with elite athletes, but their approaches differ. One is more open ended.

Stan Beecham: What I'm doing when I'm working with a person is I'm constantly adjusting myself to them.

Sana Qadar: The other has a specific method.

Jon Rhodes: Functional imagery Training is an approach which has been long developed and hugely empirically tested.

Sana Qadar: So today how Stan Beecham cultivates a winning mindset.

Sana Qadar: Um, so, yeah, I'll get you to start by introducing yourself. Your name, what you do where?

Stan Beecham: So I'm Doctor Stan Beecham. I live in Roswell, Georgia, which is a suburb of Atlanta. I have for the last 25 years split my time between working with corporate clients as well as working with athletes, mostly now professional athletes. So think about it from a standpoint of kind of the psychology of performance.

Sana Qadar: In his 25 years on the sports side, Stan has worked with all kinds of athletes.

Stan Beecham: Tennis players, gymnasts, football, baseball. I mean, the whole deal, a lot of golf, a lot of runners at the professional level.

Sana Qadar: And he says all of us, whether we're athletes or not, are capable of change. But most of us don't necessarily want to.

Stan Beecham: That's the question I get is, can people change? Yes, we can, but we don't. And so that's the question is why aren't you making the changes that would allow you to move towards your full potential? Why are you still functioning at 70 or 80% now? If you're okay with 70 80%, then rock and roll, You know, I mean, I know people that are 20 pounds overweight and they're happy being 20 pounds overweight. That's fine. Go do your thing. You know, I know people who are middle management and they're content being middle management. But if you're not content, if you have that fire in the belly, then, you know, you got to do some things differently. You have to you have to alter your life.

Sana Qadar: And Stan's clients pretty much all have that fire in their belly. But even some of them can be resistant to change.

Stan Beecham: What you what I see, Sana, when you look at just a wide range of sports, there are certain sports that have the reputation of being more mental. Like golf would be a classic example of that because very minute physiological changes. So in other words, if you make a small adjustment in your physiology, you get a big difference in the outcome, say in golf. Whereas say, if you're a football player and you're a defensive lineman, a subtle change like that isn't really going to show up. So my point is there, there are sports that have the reputation of being very mental. And so then what you see is the athletes and the coaches in those sports tend to be more open minded to doing the mental work versus sports that are more around kind of brute strength, you know, and just, you know, beat the hell out of the other guy. Those kinds of sports, Right. They don't people don't generally think of them as mental, but they are. Yeah. And that's the thing that you have to help people understand. It's every human activity is equally a combination of physiological ability and mental ability.

Sana Qadar: When would an athlete typically come to you for help with their mindset? Is it in crisis situations or just sort of normal upkeep?

Stan Beecham: No, you know, you don't. Yeah. If you're dealing with people in a crisis situation, you're just trying to pull them out of the ditch, right? So you're not going to do really any growth and development. You're just trying to get back to level ground. What I have found is when you're still learning the physical aspects of the sport, like you know how to hit a ball, how to throw a ball, how to kick a ball, whatever it is that you're doing, there's not really a good time to try to put a lot of deep work into the mental part. What I find is, is that once people have developed a pretty high level of competency from the physical standpoint, and then what you notice is you notice that you have a lot of ups and downs, like you've seen your best and you know what it looks like and you're like, Wow, I'm only at my best 60% of the time. Like, that's when you want to hire a sports psychologist, right? It's like, because if you can get that 60 to 80 or 90, then you're killing it. These people that talk about, you know, 100% this or 110% that mean that's that's not reality. We're not robots. You know, we're human beings. But as a general rule, once once an athlete has developed a pretty high level of physical competency and now they're trying to sustain this high level, that's when a sports psychologist think is best utilised.

Sana Qadar: So are the problems the athletes face at their core the same across these sports, or do they differ depending on the more physical, more mental sports?

Stan Beecham: Now anxiety is anxiety, whether whether you're worried about, you know, your your three kids at home or are you worried about whether or not the coach is going to play you today or send you down? You know, human anxiety is human anxiety. And we have a story that we're telling ourselves about what we think is going to happen. Like you, you can't you can't be anxious if you believe that things are going to work out for you. It's impossible. Anxiety is a thought distorter of the future and depression is a thought disorder of the past. In other words, if you're talking to a friend of yours who's depressed and they're starting to tell you what their depression is about, chances are they're going to tell you a story about something that happened to them. You know, my husband left me or my boyfriend left me or I got fired last week. And that's why I'm depressed. Anxiety is more about the future. When you ask people, what are you anxious about, they have a fear or concern that something undesirable is going to happen in the future. So that that's why I kind of think of a lot of things as thought disorders. In other words, if you thought differently about your situation, let's say. So if you shift your cognition, your thought process, you're going to have a different emotional experience. And what most people realise is it's easier to change a thought than it is an emotion. Like if you're anxious and say, Sonna, don't worry, it's going to be okay. Like don't be anxious. That doesn't help you.

Sana Qadar: No, it doesn't. Right?

Stan Beecham: But if I said to you, What is it that you're thinking about that makes you anxious? And you say, and you then you tell me what it is that you're thinking about specifically that makes you anxious. And then I might say, Well, is there another thought that you could have or is that the only thought that you could have? Then what you realise is, is that you're actually creating that so anxious people, which I'm talking about anxiety because it really is the biggest issue that people have, whether you're athletes or not. Okay. But what I'm what I'm saying is if I'm dealing with an athlete who's anxious, then it's imperative that you understand what their thought process in terms of what they're telling their self. And what I'm trying to do with those people is understand that anxiety is not something that happens to you. It's actually something that you create. Because keep in mind that if something is happening to you, you don't really have a whole lot of choice, do you? But if you can see your situation as something that you unintentionally created. So if I realise I'm making myself anxious or worried about the game tomorrow versus it's just happening to me, that's a very, very different process of what do you do next.

Sana Qadar: Right?

Stan Beecham: Because if I think my problem is something that you're doing, then I have to go to you and say, Hey, Santa, will you stop doing that to me? Yeah, but if I think of it as as something I'm doing to myself that I don't have to go to you and ask you to stop doing anything because I'm the one that's doing it right? It's kind of like, where's the locus of control here? And so people who really struggle with anxiety, the main thing they have to understand is that this isn't something that externally is happening to them. It feels that way. Okay? They'll say, I can't believe this is happening to me again, which is very different than I can't believe I'm doing this again.

Sana Qadar: So once you get them to realise that anxiety is something they kind of have control over and they're to a degree doing it to themselves, does that take a lot of people by surprise or how is that revelation received differently?

Stan Beecham: There are some people that they want to argue with you because so let's say my problem is anxiety, but but I'm not responsible for the anxiety. Something else is, then I'm off to hook. But if I realise that my problem is anxiety and I'm creating the anxiety now, I'm on the hook for it.

Sana Qadar: So there must be a bit of resistance sometimes too, to that.

Stan Beecham: Yeah, well, we make this assumption and it's very naive that everybody wants to get better or be their full self, and that's just simply not the truth. There are some people that they want to have a really good excuse of why their life didn't turn out. And part of my job is to help them understand is you're not really interested in being the best version of yourself. You're more invested in having a reason why, and you're going to spend the rest of your life telling people that if this didn't happen and this didn't happen, then I could have been the man.

Sana Qadar: Hmm. Do some people drop off at that point and not continue with their work with you?

Stan Beecham: No. No, not necessarily. They might. But what I want them to understand is they have a choice and they have control over the degree to which they live to their full potential. Because if you don't believe that, then you're done right. If you don't believe that you can dictate the course of your life, it's impossible to do great or amazing things. Okay. If you're a victim waiting for the wind to blow you in the next direction, there's no way you do incredible things. The only way you do incredible things, you have ownership of that.

Sana Qadar: I would have assumed that most people working in elite level sports don't really have that kind of mentality to begin with because they wouldn't be where they are with that. But. Does that still exist at that top level? And that's that's essentially why you have to come in and help.

Stan Beecham: Even at the top level. You have people at the bottom level. Right.

Sana Qadar: Yeah.

Stan Beecham: And you'll see this at each level because when you go from, say, collegiate to professional, the differentiator again is the mental ability to manage oneself and and to really focus and commit for long periods of time. And all I'm saying is, is that if you really want to talk about elite athletes and elite performance, you have to understand you're talking about a very small percentage of people.

Sana Qadar: And when it comes to getting these clients to change how they think about themselves and their potential for winning, Stan says his work isn't about doing something to clients to get them to change. It's about getting them in a space where they can make changes themselves.

Stan Beecham: The change is something that they do. So if I expose you to something that you haven't been exposed before, it could be a thought. It could be a piece of artwork. It could be a book. What happens from time to time in human life is we get exposed to things. And because we got exposed to something, we're never the same ever again. Can you can you think of an example of in your life where you were exposed to something and you were never the same after that?

Sana Qadar: Oh my gosh. Not at the top of my mind.

Stan Beecham: Do you have a child?

Sana Qadar: Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah.

Sana Qadar: That is something I mentioned in another part of the interview we haven't included, in case you're wondering how we knew that.

Stan Beecham: So when you held your child for the first time, did you have that sense? I'm forever changed.

Sana Qadar: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Okay.

Stan Beecham: But your baby didn't sit down and give you a talking to.

Sana Qadar: No, you did not.

Stan Beecham: Right? He didn't say. He didn't say, Hey, now that I'm here, the way you think about pretty much everything, Mom is now going to be shifted that your awareness and how you think about your own life because you knew in that moment that you would sacrifice your own life for that baby, right?

Stan Beecham: But nobody had to tell you to do it. And so you were changed and transformed by the experience. So what I'm saying is what I'm trying to do is not so much do something to you, because I don't believe that we as practitioners change people. I don't think in terms of I do something to you. What I'm more trying to do is say, let's have a different experience than the one that you've had before. Okay? You're playing as if A were true. What would happen if B were true? Let's pretend for a second that A isn't true. Okay? That that's actually an error in thought. And let's pretend that this is true. And so just imagine that that's true. Can you do that? And the person says yes and say, okay, now what's different? And they go, Well, fucking everything's different. What do you mean? What's different? You go, exactly. So when athletes learn this, for example, like you don't win by trying to win and in business, you don't become successful because you want to be successful.

Stan Beecham: And so then the question is, then if don't think about winning or being successful, then what do I think about? And then the answer is the things that you need to do that will lead to success. So instead of thinking about, okay, how do I make my son this wonderful kid, you think in terms of like, what do I need to do for him today? Like, what are the emotional and physical needs that he has that need to be met? That if they don't get met, he's not going to do well. And so you might do something like you read to him every night, you know, or, you know, whatever it is. So your focus is on what are the things that I need to do that are going to lead to this child becoming this particular person. And it's exactly the same thing in sport and business. You don't get rich because you want to get rich. You get rich because you do things that allow you to get rich, primarily to delay of gratification and the ability to obsess and focus on something for a long period of time. And when your competition gets bored and goes home, you're still working. And that's that's a competitive advantage.

Sana Qadar: Next episode, we're going to look at something called functional imagery training, which is a method that can help with this part, committing to the building blocks that will lead to achieving some kind of goal.

Sana Qadar: How long might you typically work with an athlete before their game starts to go from the 60 to 90?

Stan Beecham: Well, you know, it's funny because I've seen some people that you literally have a couple of conversations with them and it's like the light bulb came on. Oh, wow. And they make a pretty significant shift. I've seen other people where you talk and talk and talk for a long time before that happens or I've seen people where they make an adjustment and then they lose it. That's the more common thing, is that people will make pretty significant advancements and then they'll lose it. Oh, wow. Um, do you know who Carl Jung is?

Sana Qadar: Yes.

Stan Beecham: He was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. He was a Swiss guy.

Sana Qadar: Yeah.

Stan Beecham: And he wrote his autobiography. And Jung said an interesting thing about his own success as a psychotherapist, where he basically said a third of the people he helped pretty quickly, another third he would help, and then they would kind of lose it and have to come back. And then another third, he wasn't able to help at all, which I found to be very interesting, to think that kind of the guy who thought was the best at it a third of the time he wasn't successful at all.

Sana Qadar: Right.

Stan Beecham: People people respond differently. And every now and then, you know, you'll run into a person and they really don't want to do anything differently. They just want to tell everybody that they tried everything. And so when you work with them, they want to tell you how, you know, whatever you're doing, how that wouldn't work.

Sana Qadar: And what typically happens with them then?

Stan Beecham: Well, it's nice meeting you and have a nice life. The important takeaway here is don't make the assumption that everybody is committed to doing everything they can in their power to get better. That is not true. And the people that are sabotaging themselves, their story is you're sabotaging me. There's a lot of that.

Sana Qadar: What what proportion of clients that you end up seeing would fall into that camp?

Stan Beecham: Not not a lot at the professional level, but when you just look at the general population, kind of average people who go through life don't assume that everybody that shows up to work every morning is fully committed to doing everything in their power to make the company great. Okay. Assume that a small percentage of people are and then another small percentage is actually sabotaging you. And then you got a big group in the middle that's going to do what they tell you to do because their goal is to keep their job.

Sana Qadar: For listeners who might be listening to this episode, ordinary folks who, you know, don't want to be at that elite level but would perhaps like to be more motivated or a bit more successful. What can ordinary people listening take or learn from sort of the techniques you use with athletes or how athletes approach their mindset?

Stan Beecham: Well, I think the single best thing that you can do is really develop a tremendous capacity at being able to be truthful and honest with yourself. And a lot of people kind of skip over that and go, Yeah, I do that. Well, you don't. We all, you know, say to people, I say, Have you ever been lied to? And your answer is yes. Have you ever told a lie?

Sana Qadar: Yes.

Stan Beecham: Okay. Do you think that you've ever told yourself a lie?

Sana Qadar: Oh, yeah.

Stan Beecham: Okay. So you do that every day?

Sana Qadar: I don't know. Every day. But sometimes.

Stan Beecham: Yeah, yeah. Little things. Okay. But so. So this is juicy. So if I know that I lie, which we all do, and I know that I've believed a lie, then what are the current lies? When I say lie, I mean like a distortion of truth. Okay, so what are the current lies that I'm telling myself right now that I'm holding as truth? And instead of saying, Oh, no, don't do that, assume that you do assume that there's something that you're telling yourself in an unconscious way. Okay? Like I could never do that or I could never, you know, I could never run a marathon. You know, I could never get a doctoral degree. Whatever it is, I can never find a life partner. Understand that the chances are very good that you have a lie, that you tell yourself every day that you believe that limits you tremendously. And you don't do this because you're a bad person. You do it because you're a person, because everybody around you does it, but you don't know what it is. So then I'd say, okay, let's find out what that is like. What's the lie? Did I tell myself every day that I still believe? And so I go hunting for that. And so what happens is when you do that is you start thinking about things differently and you start having different conversations with yourself. So instead of saying, Oh, I'm not doing anything to limit myself, I'm starting the assumption if I'm doing something to limit myself and I'm not quite sure what it is. So now you're taking a whole different approach. So instead of saying, I don't have a problem, now you're looking for it. And so what's going to happen is when you do that is you're going to uncover it like you're going to look under your bed and there's going to be a monster. Okay. So then the question is, so what do you do with the monster under your bed?

Sana Qadar: Yeah. What do you do?

Stan Beecham: Well, you go face to face, you go battle to it. You don't run away from the monster. Okay. You stand right up against the monster and you say you might kill me, but I'm not afraid of you, sir. And you're going to want to run. Okay? Which is what most people do. You have to resist that. And you have to go toe to toe with it. So what I want you to think about is most people, when they think about human growth and potential, they think about they're going to add something unto themselves, Right? It's like Legos, right? Well, most people think about getting better. They think about adding pieces onto themselves. Would you agree?

Sana Qadar: Yeah. Yeah.

Stan Beecham: What I'm saying is think about better is the first thing that you do is you have to cut off a limb. Wow. Okay. Like you do surgery on yourself with a pocket knife. And what you're doing is you're cutting out that thing that you held as true that wasn't. And you first have to eliminate that when you do. Now there's a vacuum. And in that vacuum, you can play something that's true. And what I'm saying is most people don't want to do that work.

Sana Qadar: Right?

Stan Beecham: But that's the work. But if you do that work, you're forever transformed. And so what I'm essentially doing is inviting people to do that work. Like there's something that you like, like a like a cancerous tumour. We need to find out what it is and where it is and we need to cut it out. Is it going to hurt? Oh, yeah, it's going to hurt. But then after that, then we're going to replace it with something that is true. And now you become a person that's kind of on a mission and you're unstoppable and you're a badass because you're not afraid of dying. Like you can do this with pro athletes, you say, tell me about how it was in high school. Okay. And they'll say, Oh, I was always the best kid on my team and I always knew I was going to win. And so I would say so did you ever think about winning or worrying about winning? And it's like, no, I knew I was going to win. So this is the issue with confidence. If you know something's going to happen, you don't think about it. I mean, think about like in relationship, like when you first meet a person and you're trying to figure out if they love you or not. You spend a lot of time thinking, Do they love me, too?

Sana Qadar: Yeah.

Stan Beecham: And then you hopefully get to a point where you realise, yes, they do love me. And now you don't think about do they love you or not? It's out of your mind because now it's certain. And that's what you see is there's a difference between I want to do well, which is everyone. And I expect to do well. Not not I want to win the gold medal, but this is what's supposed to happen.

Sana Qadar: Is it essentially just positive thinking and manifesting, then, that this comes down to.

Stan Beecham: It's a piece. It's a piece. It's a piece of it. Okay. But if you think about the future. Okay, here's what's interesting about the future is we all think about the future, right? Yep. But do you know what's going to happen to you in the future? No. No. And no one does. But when you make plans for this weekend, let's say, or for the future life, when you make that plan and as you're thinking about it, you're acting in your mind as if this is really going to happen. Right? Okay. You're not thinking about is it going to happen or not? You're talking about when it's going to happen. It's going to happen at noon on Saturday. But what's interesting is you're creating all that. So we all have these plans about what's going to happen in my life. The reality is you don't know what's going to happen in your life, but you make up this story. And if if it's a negative story, then you're going to be anxious. Right? You know, I'm going to lose my job. This isn't going to work out. So you're making a false story, but you're pretending that it's true. Yeah. And if the story is more positive, then you're going to be optimistic or confident. What I want people to understand, what I want them to accept is the simple fact that it's a made up story. Your future is a made up story. And given the fact that it's a fictitious story, shouldn't you make one that's going to work for you the best? I mean, given the fact that you're making up this story called My Life, My Future, you know, my next thing, my, you know, next month, given the fact that you realise that it's totally fabricated in your own mind, shouldn't you give yourself the best chance? Like, why would you not? And most people, it's like it's never crossed their minds. Like my whole future is a damn made up story that I make up and then pretend it's true. So helping people understand that, you know, you're create your you're living a life and you're creating a life simultaneously all the time.

Sana Qadar: That is Dr. Stan Beecham, sports psychologist and author of Elite Minds How Winners Think Differently to Create a Competitive Edge and Maximise Success. Now, next week we get a little bit more practical. We're going to hear from Dr. Jonathan Rhodes, another sports psychologist and author of a book called The Choice Point, The Scientifically Proven Method to Push Past Mental Walls and Achieve Your Goals. He is the co-developer of something called functional imagery training or FIT, and it's all about using imagery to focus in on your goals in a huge amount of detail.

Jon Rhodes: FIT is really deeply rooted in the addiction research, and it really emerged as a powerful method of understanding and really transforming more addictive behaviours. So as you focus and give more detail on, you know, any kind of craving, the more detail you give that craving, the more you desire it. So the aim is to try and divert thinking to a goal which is really more positive and more purpose driven. And in terms of the research, yeah, there is a huge body of research. Everything from from diabetes through to weight loss studies through to, you know, within my area was more focused on sporting performance. It's more focused on well-being as well. So all these areas really overlap because we're able to support people to really focus on positive version of themselves. And has that done really thinking about how we can try to replace spontaneous or more intrusive thoughts with this positive multi-sensory kind of meticulously designed use of imagery to kind of overcome challenging goals?

Sana Qadar: That is next episode. And for this episode, we're all out of time. So thank you to producer Rose Kerr and sound engineer Roi Huberman. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time.