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speaker-0: Welcome to Peek Performance Mindset. I'm Megan Devito a performance mindset coach, a swim coach, and somebody who believes your mental game drives everything. Today's guest decided he was gonna be a coach at age 14, much to his parents' horror. They are coached and they pictured some guy in gym shorts yelling at kids. And what Chris DeSantis actually became is something entirely different a mental performance coach with a master's in applied psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. The program was founded by Martin Seligman himself. Over 15 plus years, Chris has coached athletes at the D1 level at UPenn, Georgia Tech, and led programs for the day. And now he runs his own coaching and consulting practice where he trains athletes, coaches, and teams to do something that most people don't believe is possible: to think differently on purpose. In this conversation, we get into why positive psychology isn't fluff, it's actually cognitive training. We talk about why the phrase head case needs to die and how fear-based motivation actually trains pessimism. And what happens when you realize that optimism, kindness, and mental toughness are all skills that you can. Build, personality traits that you're stuck with. Chris is the host of the Swim Brief podcast ⁓ the founder of Chris DeSantis Coaching. Whether an athlete stuck in your own ahead during competition, ⁓ or coach navigating the loneliness of leadership, ⁓ or executive who needs to perform under pressure, this conversation one of my and just what you've been looking for. Let's get to it. everybody, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Pete Performance Mindsets. I am Really excited to be able to introduce you to Chris DeSantis. Chris is a coach and a consultant. He has got some great stories for you today. Great wisdom to share with you. And in all full disclosure, we just recorded for his podcast. So you're going to want to make sure that you go back and you listen to that episode because there's a lot of good stuff in there. So Chris, thank you so much for jumping on here today with me.
speaker-1: Thank you so much for having me. Yeah.
speaker-0: So yeah, well tell everybody a little bit about what you do so we can, you know, kinda understand where we're coming from in this episode.
speaker-1: Yeah. I you know, I call myself a a coach consultant because I work in a few different areas. So first off, I do do individualized coaching. I coach athletes, I work in business settings as well. And actually the my primary area of coaching is I actually coach other coaches. So I do one to one coaching with other coaches. A lot of them in the sport of swimming. I came up in the the sport of swimming. I also part of my background is I have a master's in applied positive psychology. And so I have a whole curriculum around that that I go around and teach. And so I work with like teams and athletic departments, even trying to take some of that sort of applied knowledge from the positive psychology world out into those settings. And that's probably like more sort of the consultant side of what I'm doing.
speaker-0: Good work.
speaker-1: I know, right? Yeah.
speaker-0: That's great work. I love that we're on the same page with that. And I my hope is that the more that people like you and I talk about how important this is, the more that other people will be like, ⁓ you know what? They're on to something. Because I think for a long time there was a lot of wait. So just like positive thinking. I'm like, it's not like the I'm not telling you to believe things you don't believe. So, but to that point, like, what is it when how did you get into coaching? Like, yes, coaching swim, but I think that. People assume they in my experience, if I tell people I'm a coach, they're like, ⁓ what sport? And I'm like, Well, yes and but how did you know coaching was your jam? What was that like?
speaker-1: Yeah, so much to my parents' chagrin, I decided I was gonna be a coach at age fourteen. My dad definitely came from like a old school New England blue blood family where everybody was lawyers and doctors and went to Ivy League schools and so I think that was the plan he had for me. So he was horrified on that level. My mom, I think, just vaguely was like, Well, you know, he's gonna be highly educated and swim coach I mean, coaching, first of all, that's like Guys in gym shorts that run around next to kids and yell at them. Like that's such a undignified profession. I mean, they were truly horrified. But to be honest with you, I was, you know, I was in the eighth grade. I have been swimming for five years. It was really the only sport I'd ever stuck with. I I can't say that actually up to that point I'd I'd really enjoyed it that much. But I I found that it was a sport that if you put yourself into it, like you got something back out. I got very hooked into the part where, you know, if you if you put a little bit of work in, like you will see that improvement. You know, the clock goes down, all that stuff comes. And I had changed teams and I got a new coach. And I fell in love. I mean, with this coach, like I was so excited. come to practice. And not only did it have a big impact on me in terms of like how I was doing sports wise, but it had a knock-on impact to like the rest of my life. I was getting better grades. I was doing better socially in school. I got my first girlfriend. Like, you know, all of a sudden all the doors were open. And I thought like, how amazing that somebody could have this impact on you. Like I want to do that. That sounds like the coolest thing that I could possibly do. And from that point forward, I was all the way hooked into it.
speaker-0: Your first coaching gig like was where was it? What you do like big kids, little kids, all the kids?
speaker-1: So it's hard to say what the first one is. I actually this is, you know, if I if I go post college, right, if I go like ⁓ you know, I I did a little bit of summer
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league coaching and other stuff. ⁓ and like I've told a story in in other contexts, but even all the way down to like when I was a high school swimmer, I've had my high school swim coach on on my podcast. So y if if people want to go back and listen, you can hear her talk about this. I was like coaching other guys on the team. I was making lineups for dual meets. I was scouting other teams. So like I was into that stuff and preparing for, you know, my career from that point forward. Actually in college, I I I interned with a swim club. So I was doing, you know, swim lessons, learn to swim, coaching an age group. And then post college, I went to work at an all boys boarding school. in western Pennsylvania. Okay. ⁓ yeah. And somehow amazingly I met my wife that year. Not in western Pennsylvania when I was home. Right. Thank God. But I I I moved from there into college coaching. I I managed to hook on more or less as a volunteer coach at the University of of Pennsylvania. And from there went to go coach at Georgia Tech. I was an assistant coach at at Georgia Tech for four years. From there I went to coach abroad. I'm a dual citizen of the United States and Denmark. I coached in Denmark for four years. I got fired from my job in Denmark and quite traumatically. And we returned to the United States and my mom was sick. My mom had a brain tumor. She was dying. It was a really, really bad time in my life. And so I did what any sane person would do is, you know, start a business because that's not stressful or tough on your mental health. So I went into business for myself coaching. But I I I had always had the sense of that that that was something that I could do. And that, you know, one of my frustrations, I I mentioned my background in positive psychology earlier, is that I had this I had this big tool set. But when in a lot of environments, you know, particularly the higher end environments that I was coaching on, I felt like there was so little time to implement some of the stuff that I
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: wanted to do. Like I knew I could make a real difference if I sat down with somebody that I was coaching for an hour a week. Okay, but I was coaching twenty people and and there's practice time too. There wasn't twenty hours a week to, you know, do an individual session and and move all these people forward. So I I had a sense that, you know, going independent, I could make a different impact than I could in some of these team settings. And I I decided to find out like if that was truly true, right? If that was actually possible.
speaker-0: I love it that you brought that up and that you said how much your coach impacted you. And it sounds like the culture on your first team was incredible. I mean, it I really feel like there's a tone that has to be set. And whether it's, I mean, yes, technique, yes, all those, you know, stats and entries and all those things are important. But when push comes to shove, if if a team doesn't have solid culture, it's a mess. ⁓ So if you look At what it is that you bring with your consulting and your coaching. Like whether you're working with a team or you're working one on one, what is that like? And like what is it, the foundation that maybe you took from your like what did you learn about how to develop that to have athletes or business owners or whoever like trust you with that? There's it sounds like a culture thing, is what I'm saying, I guess.
speaker-1: Yeah, I think I think there's a lot of there's a lot of aspects. If I think back to it specifically that that team that hooked me in when I was a a kid, first off again, I think it speaks to the value that a coach has. We we look at like a lot of different situations and you go, Well, you know, like that that team, they they work with people on a really high technical level or they're the hardest working team or You know, at the end of the day, I think a lot of kids, the relationship that they have with their coach is everything in terms of whether or not they hook into the sport and choose to, you know, try to develop how they work on a technical level or choose to like really push the limits of how hard they work. So the foundation for me with everything and a lot of the work that I do now in coaching coaches and education is a lot around How do we get to a point where your relationships on the team are strong enough such that like every coach I know has so much knowledge that they could use to make an athlete on their team better, but they get very little of it through, right? And the to me, the relationship is that kind of focus point that determines how much you're actually able to teach and transmit. to the athletes. So the relationship piece is a big part of it. Another thing that I reflect on and I think like as a coach, if if you're not learning from the people that you're coaching, even about your own process, you're missing out. ⁓ and so I'll share an insight that an athlete actually gave me that I've carried with and like realized, ⁓ that's that's my thing. That's part of what I do. I was coaching at Georgia Tech and ⁓ I had a really, really diverse group of swimmers. I think we had about twenty athletes in the water, seven different countries, and people bringing all sorts of different kind of approaches. Like everybody was hardworking, but they were hardworking in in different ways, right? I had one guy who was like Mr. Consistent. I had one guy who literally had like no limiter. He would just go for it, right? And ten reps in. He could barely move. And the two of them the the reason I bring this up is because the two of them didn't necessarily like sometimes if I didn't do my job coaching wise, they could look at each other and go, That guy's stupid. He's doing it wrong. Right. Instead of respecting that, like, that guy's working really hard. I'm working really hard in this other way, could do it. But I but I actually asked the group of athletes that I was coaching, I said,
Hey, I got a new batch coming in. What did they need to know about what it's like to have me as a coach? And this guy, and you talk about relationships, the guy who answered this question, the last time I watched him swim a lap was 2013. But we have a relationship to this day. Like I I've I love that. So he says to everybody else, he says, Your head's gonna hurt at every practice because you're gonna have to think a lot. Chris is gonna ask you to think. Think and then and then when you think you've thought it all the way through, he's gonna ask you to think through think it through again and again and again and again. And I thought about it for a second, I go, yeah, that's right. Because at the end of the day, a lot of what I end up doing is I'm trying to train people through cognitive processes. I'm trying to get them to think differently because it's that process of thinking differently that. Unlocks everything else, right? The way that you can actually start to show up in a different way to realize different parts of your potential or take on new knowledge, it has everything to do with what is my thought process approaching those moments. And so I push people really, really hard on that piece.
speaker-0: Love that. And it's such it I think it's the hardest hardest thing for us to be aware of is our thinking. We just we we take it as like the news ticker at the bottom of a screen, right? Like it's rolling and we just like, wow, that's happening and that's happening and that's happening. And we just believe it because it's there without questioning it. But that idea of pausing to say, what am I actually thinking about right now? And when I when I think that, how do I behave? Or am I not thinking about anything? Am I just like driving my way through the this process, whether it's swimming or anything else, am I just on autopilot? Have I thought about anything today? But slowing down enough to think about what you're thinking is just a next level sort of thought process. I was, I was talking with someone, a a guy who he he works for a business down in Louisiana. And I was talking with him the other day. And I said, we really need you, I need you to start being very aware about the story that you're telling about yourself at this job. Like, this is what you're saying to me. And if it's coming out of your mouth, it's going through your mind. So I need you to be aware. And he goes, How do I do that? I go, you have to think about what you're thinking. And I said, the easiest way for you to do that is you're going to need to write it down. I mean, you might even just really have to say, What did I just say? What did I just say? But to have the consciousness, maybe to say, wait a second, hold on a second. I need to pause and rewind my brain. What did I say? Why would I say that? And I guess for a general rule of thumb, I'm like, if you wouldn't say it to your grandmother and you wouldn't say it to your mom and you wouldn't say it to your kid, you're not
allowed to say it to yourself. And we can get so wrapped up in this running narrative of garbage that's just not true. Like, what are you thinking about? Are you actually thinking about what you're changing and what you want? Or are you just thinking about everything you don't want? It's such a it's a tough thing to do.
speaker-1: Yeah. And I think you're pointing to something like the probably the number one thing that I think is a really universal with people that I work with is they are coaching themselves. Everybody coaches themselves to a certain degree. For the most part, to ourselves, we are the worst coach you could possibly imagine. I mean I have I have very simply like put people through the exercise of, you know, getting them to to externalize and you said, like, let's write down all the all the like stuff that you're directing at yourself right now. And I say, I want you to just imagine your boss saying this, or like, you know, with like a lot of teen athletes, I'll be like, I want you to imagine your coach saying this to you. Instead of you saying it to you, coach is now standing up on the pool deck and yelling this at you. So how much longer would you be on that team? Mo I mean most of them they're like, I'd quit tomorrow. It's ridiculous. They can't talk to me like that, right? But that's what they're doing to themselves. And I mean, I recognize it because I am that person as well. I think we are.
speaker-0: some point, right? Like we're like, wow, whoa, that was awful.
speaker-1: Yeah. Unchecked. That's who I am as well. Right. I can be absolutely awful to myself. It's not it's not doesn't mean I'm a a negative person, just means I'm actually like a person. That's how people are to themselves. And unless they build some skills for thinking differently and and get some strategies around challenging that, they will stick with that as a strategy, double down. I mean, ⁓ I've worked with so many athletes that just think like, ⁓ gosh, if I was just a little bit meaner to myself, then I would pull through. And like, you know, I'll I'll be usually the unfortunately they get to me when they've doubled down on that strategy for years, and they're just having such a terrible time doing the basics even of the sport that they're participating in. And it's like, They've never even challenged that that's their plan. It's just it's been unconsciously running as the plan in the background without any kind of checks on it.
speaker-0: Yeah. Kind of that definition of insanity. You just keep working on that and see if that helps you after a while. Right. But to that, so because you work with coaches, like coaches helping athletes and coaching coaches, what do you tell if you go to a club or to a team or wherever you whoever you're talking and they're trying to figure out how to deal with their athletes? Like I have this kid. Like, do are you helping them recognize that when maybe they don't have that background in positive psychology and they're Like, I don't know what to do with this person over here. They just they're constantly have this thing where they're mad at their teammates or they're mad at themselves or they shut down or they freak out. Like, how how are you teaching those coaches to do it? Because so many people, I think, for for a long time when we talk about sports, those coaches have technique on lock. Right. Like they you they're good. They know how to make great athletes. They may not have that mindset thing on I I just see it over and over again where they're like, I don't know what to do with them. They just keep freaking out. They're always crying in the bathroom. Or, you know, I'm like, there's no crying on a pool deck or whatever. There's no crying in baseball. So when they they're looking at like, I don't know what to do with them. What like how do you coach those coaches?
speaker-1: Well so like I think what you're talking about is and I one of the reasons why I've leaned so hard into coaching coaches, even though it's tough. I mean, I I I will admit it's it's hard. It's hard to get coaches into the mindset of even wanting to be coached. Like many of them psychologically have moved on to a space where they're like, Well, no, I'm the coach now. Like nobody coaches me which again, unchallenged ⁓ Once I start to challenge that, I don't get a lot of people who are like, ⁓ yeah, like I was right. You know, they they sort of know intuitively on some level that that's wrong, but that's that's where they are. It's so it is a big challenge to break in with a coaching audience. But like this to me, this is where all the opportunity is. Because I think you're right. The the average level, I'm not saying there are some people that are better than others, they have different skill sets, but I'm just saying your average coach. you know, again, in the sport of swimming, the one that I came out of, I think is like really good at teaching the technical aspects of the sport. They're really good at training. They have a lot of like really good foundational ideas about training. When it comes to the psychological side of the sport, they they don't know what they're doing. And and yet many of them are like finding themselves more and more being challenged in that department, you know, because the The the culture has changed, the climate has changed. Kids are more open. Kids are more willing to talk about what's going on with them, right? And not suffer in silence or be scared to share that with the coach. And so a lot of the coaches I get in on the other end are like, Man, I'm finding myself in a lot of conversations where I have no idea what to do. This is uncomfortable. And I I yeah, I'm uncomfortable. And I better, you know, get some tools for figuring out what I'm doing. The other thing that I would say that I And it'll clues into some of what I work on with coaches, is a lot of it is based just around language and communication. One of the big things that I have noticed as
there's been a broader discussion of mental health in sports is a lot of the language that has come in has been from the clinical world, from the therapy world. We had a conversation on my podcast about like all the self-diagnosis piece of it. And I think that language. Is at best really, really clunky for coaches to use because for the most part, we're not mental health professionals, we're not trained. And even if we were, I'm not sure it would be appropriate for us to use it in a coaching environment. So positive psychology, just through the way that, you know, through its sort of foundational concepts, it gives language for. people to be able to discuss a lot of the same things, but without falling back on this sort of clinical cold, for lack of a better term, even problem-based language. And I think that speaks to where coaches are, right? Because I was having a conversation with a coach about this yesterday that I'm going be working with next year. You know, all that language is from the Traditional psychology or the clinical world is it's from a rehabilitative model. And coaches, we don't do rehabilitation. Like the the PTs do rehabilitation. We do training. Positive psychology is the language of training your mind. And so I try to give coaches a way to communicate to athletes about how to train your mind, how to build up your competencies, how to say, look at situations that you find yourself in and develop, you know, new ways of thinking for approaching those so that you show up differently. And so a lot of it is is built around that. And again, you know, think, think again, think again, just continuing to iterate on that because there's truly no end point, right? Where you just go like, ⁓ well, we've found the perfect way to think about that. So, you know, moving on. We don't have to do anything anymore. Right. It's it's lovely in a in a certain way because it remains so open ended. And you can always continue to do
speaker-0: Interesting once you start digging into ⁓ I didn't, I didn't necessarily realize I was even thinking this, or I didn't realize how much that thought impacted either how I'm behaving or you know, my beliefs, whatever whatever it is that it's impacting. That once we smooth one thing over, like, okay, I handled that, another one pops right up. I mean, it's always that process of there's going to be something because life is gonna happen. There's always going to be another situation where. You're not ever gonna get to the point where you have this like perfectly manicured mind. It's going to be like wild and crazy in there. And it is something that we just have to recognize that our brains are gonna go a little off the rails sometimes. And that's okay. And, you know, the whole diagnosis conversation aside, people's brains are gonna what's it? Brains are gonna brain. They're just gonna do their thing. And sometimes we just have to understand who we are so we can say, okay, back on track. That sometimes that happens. And I can still do all of these things that I need to focus on changing and working on. It's such a, yeah, it's such an interesting thing where when you have those coaches that spend so much of their their training, yes, they're well trained and being able to help their athletes perform, that they don't. I I think it's unfortunate that we don't, that we're just now coming into this place where like, but do you know how much your brain impacts your body and how much it impacts. like affects those physical results. I had my swimmers last season sit down and we did a visualization. And so I had this sweet freshman come in. Bless him. He was like true, like just coming into high school freshman, very young freshman. And so I said, you're just gonna all you have to do, let me explain this to you, you're just gonna lay here with your eyes closed and listen to me talk. I'm like, that's all. And they're like, that's all I have to do. So afterwards he sits up and he's kind of sleepy. And I was like, okay, that worked well for him. He's a little, he's a little zoned out, which I loved. He goes, Are you a witch? And I go, What? I go, No, why? He goes, Did you just put a spell on us? And I'm like, No, I didn't. I was like, This is and like that's just it's a meditation. Think of it a prayer. It's what whatever you want to call it. It's a meditation. It's a prayer. It's a visualization. I'm like, you're I'm explaining to them how. When you practice it inside of your brain, your brain assumes it's true. You know, I'm giving them all the things. So we get to our conference meet and these kids, I'm like, Do you remember when we practiced this? I recorded this for you. Do you know? I'm like, what are you going to get in this race? And I have several kids that'd be they'd tell me their time and they'd get in and they're like, What'd you just do? And I'm like, What did I just do? I didn't do anything. I'm like, I'm like, You nailed your time. Like with I mean, within just a couple hundred tenths of a second, hundredths of a second. And they're like, I don't understand how that happened. I'm like, when you practice it, your brain makes it happen. I'm like, we just practiced it. And they were mystified. By the end of it, they're like, I had ⁓ my gosh. So we got to the last meet of the season for this one kid who's a junior. And somebody's like, I just was out of breath. You know, I was like, I was at, I couldn't quite do it. And this kid looks at him and he goes, Oxygen is a mindset. And I'm like, too far. Like, ha ha. Yes, but no. I'm like, it's sinking in slowly. We're getting there. But he's like, oxygen is the mindset. You know oxygen is the mindset. And I'm like, well, oxygen's not only mindset. Like we're trying, we're trying so hard. But it's just so interesting. Like the things that if if more coaches would incorporate those things. And so when you think about all the tools or all of the different thought processes, what is the one that if you go in and
you're like step one, this is where we start.
speaker-1: But it is a necessity. Well, so where I start always, and I I built a whole coaching program for coaches, so this is an easy question for me to answer because people who've been through it, like they're like they they know exactly what I'm gonna say first. I start with motivation because where a lot of people like want to engage with this kind of work is way as far as I visualize it on the other end of the spectrum, right? They they're struggling with performance. Or they're they're having some issues around performance and they want to fix that. And for me, I think those issues usually that they're dealing with start all the way back to the way that you motivate yourself and the way that you actually build infrastructure around it. You know, we talked about this earlier in terms of some of the the dysfunctional things that people lean into. I think most people unconsciously, if they never think structurally about their motivation, they default to scaring the ever living daylights out of themselves to get themselves to do things. Right. They tell themselves some kind of version of like I I have like an improv routine where I go out and the first time I'm talking and I'll go to a group of athletes and go, Okay, where's a moment where you especially swimming athletes, where you struggle with your motivation? And some kid inevitably, what do they answer? ⁓ morning practice. You know, I woke up, I gotta go to, you know, it's the crack of dawn, it's cold outside, I gotta go over to the pool. I go, Great. Okay, what do you tell yourself to get yourself over there? And inevitably, nine out of ten kids will go, Well, tell myself, I have to go. I have to go where I'm not gonna swim fast, or I'm not gonna achieve and I'm like Okay. Now, what people don't realize and what I try to Teach them in terms of motivation is when you just press that motivational button over and over and over again, you are literally training your own pessimism. You're telling yourself over and over again, if you don't, if you're not perfect, you will fail. Okay. And then you wonder why I'm showing up to a competition and I've like worked my butt off for six months and yet. My attitude is like, ⁓ I hope I do okay. ⁓ my God, what if I don't do okay? Like what's wrong? Like that's what you trained up. That that's what you developed, right? And we instinctually we go to that because that fear gets you, no doubt. Okay. If you just look at a a little local situation, fear gets you from point A to point B. Okay. You know, we'll all get our Blood pumping, if if a wild animal's chasing us and we think, you know, we got to survive, that fear will get you. But it does not care about the long term. And it doesn't build long term infrastructure for motivation. And for most people, it's not true. That's not really what you think. You know, on some level, you understand that you want to get up in the morning and go over and train because you think it's going to give you a better chance to do well. But that second one. Is not as immediately available. And it takes a little bit more patience and development and long-term thinking and even like sort of multi-step thinking, right? That's not just A to B. Thinking around, okay, I'm gonna, this is how I'm gonna set up motivating myself to do things now. And that will contribute to me six months from now showing up differently when it's actually time for me to perform and compete. So motivation. And and I call it motivational infrastructure is always where I start.
speaker-0: Yeah, I love that. I just had that conversation with the kid the other day about practice, specifically going to practice. And I'm like, all right, what are you looking forward to? Well, I mean, I know I gotta go. So I guess I'll go work my hardest. And and I was like, whoa, that doesn't sound fun at all. And so I had a conversation. This was a couple of years ago with this little girl I was coaching. She was pretty young. And she her dream, so she swam for Carmel. And I'm coaching her and she her mom sent her to me because she was so anxious. So I previously I coached on anxiety specifically. I get this little girl who's anxious behind the blocks. So again, I'm again performance anxiety or whatever. And I was like, hey, what is it that when you like what's your goal? And her goal, she's swimming in the same club and she's swimming without the shackle, right? Alex just fast. Like, okay, first of all, she's five years older than you. And second of all, it's Alex Shackl. Come on. So she I was like, Well, what's the problem? And she goes, Well, what how am I gonna be as fast as her? And I was like, She's an anomaly. But but I said, Well, have you ever asked her what how she got so fast? And she said, No, I've never talked to her. And I was like, Well, this week you're gonna go ask her how you got fast. So I was like, How are you gonna do that? She I'll have to take my friends with me. I said, Fine, take your friends. So they all gather up after practice, they run over. And this little girl mustered up the courage to ask her about how, like, how did you get so fast? And she said, ⁓ it's easy. Every day before practice, I come in and I pick on Coach John. And then we joke around for a long time before practice. And and she said, It's really fun. And so this little girl comes back to me and I said, Well what'd you learn? She goes, She said she picks on Coach John and that it's fun. And I said, So what if that's the right answer? She said, well, which part? I go, what if it's just supposed to be fun? What if the whole thing is it has to be fun? So this kid who I'm talking to yesterday, I'm like, when you come back next week, your job, like you have to find something that's fun. Cause right now, you are a giant, like you're just a cluster of red flags for burnout. You're going to be burnout. You're not going to get that nationals cut because you're just muscling your way
through. And so to your point, like motivation and for me. My first step is always like, What is fun about this? And if your answer is I just wanna be fast, I'm like, Oof, it's gonna be a rough road.
speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. I think my I find myself thinking about it all the time, even in like in my adult life. Like I I still compete in swimming. I s I do do I do master swimming. Yeah. I have swum a lifetime best. I'm forty two years old. I swam a lifetime best in the last twelve months. Yeah. And I'm a dad and I'm a husband and I'm running my own business. I got other shit going on. I don't know if we're allowed to swear on this five guys.
speaker-0: You contested, it was A okay. ⁓
speaker-1: Okay, I got other shit going on, but I don't struggle to go to the pool. Because when I go to the pool, I know exactly why I'm there. And it's not to go best time. That's that's something that happens. And I want that to happen, but I am at the pool because I think it makes me better at everything else that I care about. And it has a positive impact on everything else that I care about. And so Why wouldn't I go? Right. Like it's almost like you'd have to talk me out of going. And that's a difference. I mean, ⁓ I I wasn't always that way, right? I I definitely had a moment in my own athletic career where I was like, I have to go to practice and ⁓ what a drag. And you know, so that's just a that's a step in a progression for a lot of people. And again, that's where I sort of come back to it with coaches, is like understand that. The way people are showing up psychologically, that's something that they have learned to do. It's like a bad technique, right? It's in the same way you said earlier, or you said on my podcast, you're talking about muscle memory. It's it's a mind, it's gotten grooved in, you know, to the gray matter to think along certain lines. And you can be frustrated about that for sure. But the good news is they can groove in a different way of thinking. Like it is possible the mind is flexible. There's there's neuroplasticity. And we can train a different thought process around all this stuff. And their approach will change. And if you look at it like that, right, as a trainable skill, just like you would a freestyle, a turn, a start, any other skill part of the sport, then you have a chance to change directions on that. I think the biggest part where I mean, I know that. Unfortunately, this is the way I was treated in a lot of instances as an athlete. You know, when I started to struggle psychologically, I had a series of coaches that were like, This this guy's just a head case. You know, that's that's what they that's what they used to say back then, right? Right. This this guy's a head case. And that was like sort of a coach way of being like, It's not my responsibility to try to do anything about this. That's just his problem. Or that's just, you know, how he is. And I just couldn't disagree more. Right. I I firmly reject that. And I'm trying
to get out there in the world and and help other people to help kids like me help, you know, the next generation of athletes write a different story about what it's like to to do the sport.
speaker-0: Yeah. I feel like you just answered my last question. Like if you could tell anybody, like this is what you need to know about positive psychology, whether it's in sports or business, I think that idea that I mean, we're all in our heads. So I guess technically does that make us all a head case? Like what would you want them to know? Like, what's the thing that you're like, look, this is the biggest deal that you need to know? Is it that?
speaker-1: I think the biggest deal and the the the revelation I will say to me about positive psychology where I hooked into it in the first place. I was actually I was coaching at Penn, right? And this was when they started the program, first of its kind in United States. ⁓ Martin Seligman, who's a psychologist out of the University of Pennsylvania, has written some big psychology books, founded the program, and he had written a book that I read before I started called Learned Optimism. Now, mm I tell people this story all the time. Martin Seligman had a 30 years prior to developing a theory of learned optimism, had been responsible for something that I think has come into more popular usage now, learned helplessness. Right? He had figured out like you can learn to lose all hope and think like there's nothing I can do. This is a, you know, helpless situation. So I might as well just not try. But if that's true. Then people can also learn the other side, right? Of that coin. People can learn to be hopeful. People can learn to be optimistic. And to me, it's just an example of what positive psychology tends to focus on is the fact that there's all these things that in other contexts we might start to think of as fixed traits. Like that's just, you know, they're just a really positive person. I don't agree. I I think that you can learn to do those things. The the the the the most recent one that I have really been iterating a lot on is I realize I used to think that this was just a trait of how people were. I used to think that, you know, kindness was just a trait of how people are. I don't believe that anymore. I think kindness is is something that you can develop and it changed the way that I viewed people. in my life where I go, that person's really kind. I think sometimes we like deny all the work that went into that by being like, ⁓ they're just, you know, that's just how they are. No, no, no. No, no, no. It it it it takes work within you to develop that stuff. And it's possible to to change so much. Just in the same way you, you know, go in the weight room and you you do some bicep curls and you get, you know, muscle hypertrophy and the the muscles get bigger, The same is possible in your mind. You can train things and you can develop things and you can really, really grow into something completely different than than where you were at a different stage of your life.
speaker-0: That is a world changing.
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: That's the goal for everybody listening to this podcast is to go change your mind. We have to do it. But the idea that we can choose kindness and change how we react and who we are and all of that, that's that's the good stuff. That's what we want. I mean, whether it's athletes or anybody else, like it's I think that the goal of coaching is to make everybody a better human for themselves, but for everybody too. So ⁓ my goodness. Okay. How do people find you and connect with you and What kind of goodies do you have to offer them?
speaker-1: So, as we referenced earlier, my podcast is called the Swim Brief Podcast. If you want to listen to interviews like the one I did with Megan, it's really, really good. So you guys should go and do that. But I interview all sorts of other people, people from the swimming world, sports psychologists. Basically, the podcast is like anybody that I get really curious about and I want to like, you know, learn. I I get them on there and I I steal all their knowledge from them. You didn't know you were part of my devious plot. But the swim brief podcast. Yes, if you if you want to email me, I'll give out my real personal email address, Crdesantis at gmail.com D E S A N T I S. You can go to my website, Chris Dcoach.com. ⁓ there's a contact form there. You can fill out and send to me. And finally you can find me on Instagram, Chris D underscore Coach, as well.
speaker-0: But we all have plots.
speaker-1: And if you go there, you you'll find clips of the podcast and occasionally, you know, ⁓ other random things, but mostly clips of the podcast.
speaker-0: Let's do it. Go find him. Say hello. Check out his podcast and make sure that you come back here for more. There's always more shorts, more clips, and more information. So you can watch this on YouTube. You can find it on any of the podcast platforms and you definitely want to check out Chris's podcast as well. So thank you for listening and for joining us. And I will be back again.
speaker-1: Thank you.