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Show notes
On this episode of The Full Desk Experience, we have a very special guest joining us – Julie Jones, a renowned mental performance coach. We delve into the power of mindset and mental toughness, exploring how they can impact success in any field. Julie shares personal stories, from her own experiences as a coach to working with teams across the country, including CEOs and athletes. We also discuss the importance of gratitude and managing burnout, as well as the fascinating effects of visualization and pre-experiencing events. So, get ready for an insightful and inspiring conversation as we uncover the keys to peak performance and well-being. Stay tuned for The Full Desk Experience Industry Spotlight with Julie Jones!
Transcription
Julie Jones [00:00:00]:
Losers have goals, winners have systems. Scott Adams, I’ll give him the credit for that. But if you’re not focused on process, you’re going nowhere. And this is all process oriented. We just allow ourselves to get out to the 30,000ft and when we need to be 30ft ahead a lot of the time.
Kortney Harmon [00:00:21]:
Hi, I’m Kortney Harmon, staffing and recruiting in principal at Crelate. This is the full Desk Experiences Industry Spotlight series where we are talking with the top leaders and influencers who are shaping the talent industry. In this series, we’ll be shining a light on popular trends, the latest news and the stories that laid the groundwork for their success.
Julie Jones [00:00:51]:
Today.
Kortney Harmon [00:00:52]:
I am thrilled to have joining a very special guest and when I say very special, very special to me, that’s for sure. I know many of you of you are going to love the insights from this conversation. My Division One college softball coach is here to talk to us. Julie Jones, who has dedicated over 25 years of her life leading many Division One softball programs to success, is here to join us. She has an incredible wealth of knowledge when it comes to motivation, leadership, team building and getting the most out of your players. And all of these things are so equally applicable to the business world. Julie has mentored truly thousands of college athletes over many, many years and received numerous awards. Though retired from college athletics, julie has taken her passion for developing talent and winning mindsets into consulting and speaking. So she is now a certified mental performance coach, serving athletes, coaches and business leaders, providing tools and practices to increase well being, performance and truly overall success. We’ll be picking Coach Jones’s brain about how lessons from the ball field can truly translate into wins into the workplace when it comes to things like fostering teamwork, effective communication, handling pressure and so much more. I can’t wait to glean some wisdom she has cultivated over the decades of success and coaching. And it’s going to be so insightful and practical conversation on leadership and performance and hopefully not too much dirt on me and my college experience. So with that being said, Coach Jones, thank you so much for joining us today on the show.
Julie Jones [00:02:28]:
I could not be more humbled, first of all to be here, honored and pleased. I’m so proud of the success that you found. Obviously we found a lot of success together and that has just amplified as you’ve gone through your career. And this is a thrill, an absolute thrill. And I wonder what you’re going to call me because Coach Jones seems I’m not going to lie. Jones. Jones, right, is what I think you have always called me. Not addressing me that way back in the day. But you can call me whatever you want now, court, you’re in charge.
Kortney Harmon [00:03:00]:
You’re so sweet. I appreciate it. When I said Julie, I’m not going to lie, I kind of cringed a smidge. It just didn’t come natural to me, so I love it. Thank you so much for joining us. And as we dive into this, I want you to tell the audience a little bit more, I know I didn’t do it justice for what you’re doing now and how you went from coaching to performance and how it truly relates to business and honestly, why our leaders should lean into this conversation.
Julie Jones [00:03:23]:
Well, mindset training or mental performance training is vital to success. We all have great tactical and technical and some of us physical and intellectual methods and knowledge, and we stack all those things up. But none of those things are as solid or as functional without this foundation of mental stability in performance really is what we’re talking about. I coached for more than 25 years. As you know, you were a great part of that, and we had a lot of fun together, won a lot of games. You got hurt at an inopportune time, which turned into something amazing as you stayed for that last final year doing all your work while trying to finish up your degree. We were practicing at like 06:00 A.m. And at 10:00 p.m. At night, I think something like that to get you and Op to practice, which was really important because you are leaders. But you know how hard it is to balance all those things and to keep a mindset that is helpful to us. But in my coaching, we spent time thinking about this. We were very fortunate when we were at Cleveland State to have Dr. Sue Ziegler as our sports psychologist. And she really got me hooked on this. I did some in college, but it really started to really sink in when she came up to me after a game one time and she said, Julie, do you know why you lost? And I said yes. I said, we did not score as many runs as the other team and this, that, and the other. She goes, Nope. You lost because of you. And I was like, Wait a minute. The ball didn’t go through my legs. I didn’t strike out. This is what I’m initially thinking, of course, because we get defensive. And she said, we lost because of you and your focus and your attitude. And I was like, wow. Immediately I was like, thank you. Because no one ever tells the head coach that. Just like no one tells the boss or the leader what their mindset does to everyone else. And that’s something we always need to be thinking about. So she got me hooked on this. When I moved on to the University of Akron, she came and helped us there, and we instilled this. We even had stations for mental training in our hitting rotation. And then once I left coaching, I thought, okay, I’m a coach. I have to coach, so how can I continue to give back to athletes and leaders and performers we all perform. And I thought, this is a great way. And one little other caveat. When I was at Cleveland State, this is before you, I think, oh no, no, you were there. I was diagnosed with breast cancer. You’ll probably remember that. I think it might have been your sophomore year maybe. And I would go to Dr. Ziegler’s office three days a week and she would run me through visualization because my job was to box. She said, you got to knock the cancer cells out of your body. So I boxed it out. Now, whether or not that really affected the cancer cells is hard to really diagnose. But what it did is it gave me control. And if you look at the research in visualization and imagery and mental rehearsal, you can change your physiology. And I’m sure that’s something we’re going to talk about as we go. But all these things led to this amazing job that I have now, working with teams all over the country. I fly to Portland next week actually, to work with their women’s basketball team. And every Friday morning at 08:00 A.m., I talk to a CEO of a nonprofit. We’re ranging from eleven year old athletes to CEOs that have just vast experience, all talking about the same things because we’re humans and our brains all work the same and we’re all just trying to do our best. So I think that’s some of the things we’re going to talk about today, and I’m pumped about it.
Kortney Harmon [00:06:54]:
I love it. We always talk on our show about foundational processes. It really comes down to the way your people learn, the way they go through their systems of technology, the way they perform their jobs. But this actually is like even more foundational than the foundational building blocks. It’s really the mental aspect of going into your day to day. I obviously am bought into this, and I recall many of my own conversations with Dr. Ziegler. She made a very similar comment to me at one point in time. She’s like, well when someone makes an error, you have to say, hey, it was my bad. I’m like, but it wasn’t my bad that they made that error. When you first hear it, it’s crazy to think, but you know what? As a leader on a team, it’s like, hey, that was my bad. I hung my curveball and it shouldn’t have been there. So therefore it shouldn’t have came to you. Then your player looks at that mentality to be like, hey, you’re right, it wasn’t my fault, it was yours out of this whole thing. I’m glad to know it was all your fault that we lost that game. So I appreciate that. I love it. I’m super excited and obviously very pumped about this conversation. So obviously you’re working with both college athletes, young athletes, and now business leaders. What are some key similarities and or differences you’ve noticed in their mindset, in their approaches?
Julie Jones [00:08:02]:
Well, if you think about performing in a business aspect and performing in an athletic arena, the difference is that athletes actually train for frustration and dealing with failure and game plans and all these things. And business leaders don’t train for this. That is the major difference. But they are parallel worlds in all reality. You’re dealing with imposter syndrome. You’re dealing with failure. Think about it. I talk with a sales team at a Fortune 500 in Cleveland. They put out 20,000 sales calls and they turn over in the end about 2% of those. When it all gets nailed down, think about the failure. It’s a constant. The other thing that athletes do, they learn how to focus. Right? We’re constantly working on focus and we don’t do that in a business setting. We’re working on communication. We do that some in a business setting, but it’s different. I think without communication on a field, you’re done toast. And you are in a business as well. But it somehow can almost be covered up a little bit differently, I think, in business. But I think the biggest difference is that athletes train for these things. It doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily perfect at them, but they know that failure is inherent, particularly in the sport that we’ve played and coached. If you hit 300, you have a chance of being All American. That means you fail seven times out of ten. But if you look at business calls, if you make one out of 25, that’s good. But dealing with that, learning how to reset, learning how to change your perspective is something that all business leaders can benefit from.
Kortney Harmon [00:09:38]:
I love that. I think that’s great. You talked about the parallels and the things that are alike. What parallels do you see between building a successful sports team and building a successful business team? Sometimes whenever we look at building a successful business team, we just have an empty hole and then we have a body and we’re like, oh, round hole, round peg, they match, we’re good. But in reality, that’s not always the best way to set us up for success. So talk to me about the parallels between sports teams and business teams.
Julie Jones [00:10:04]:
Teams are teams and we’re all working toward a goal together. So we need each other to find our way. And innately, we are meant to work in teams, right? Relationships are the biggest predictor of longevity over healthy habits, over everything. But innately, we are not either. We’re very individualistic thinkers. So building teams is difficult because we don’t agree with everybody that we work with and we don’t have to. That’s the point. I mean, you and I have very different ideas on certain things in life. That does not change the way that we work together, nor does it change the way that we care about each other. And that’s something that makes a big difference. But it’s setting up a culture that is driven by communication number one. John Gordon, the author, likes to say that where there’s a void in communication, negativity fills it. And think about that. You send someone a text message and they don’t get back to you. You think, Did I do something?
Kortney Harmon [00:11:04]:
They’re mad.
Julie Jones [00:11:05]:
You automatically go there. And the truth of it is they looked at it and they forgot to respond. Or they read it and then they got distracted. It has nothing to do with you. Like my dad told me years ago, he’s like, Jewel, people are not thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are, right? And I said, how do you know, Daddy? Because they’re too busy thinking about themselves. And that’s the trick. That’s the hurdle that we have to get over when we’re building teams. If we can communicate, if the leader has contagious behaviors and contagious energy, and not everyone is full of energy, but a contagious, I don’t know. We’ll say aura, right? If we can make people feel valued regardless of what their role is and allow people to play to their strengths, that takes some work. But being consistent is very important in how we respond to people and then showing people, like, our thing. Throughout my career, my coaching philosophy was caring, communication and class. I had a thing on my wall that said coaches of the year think one thing. They know that people do not care about what you say until they know you care about them. So caring can be done in a lot of different ways. And then the communication thing was piece was vital. We were going to tell you what your role was, whether you liked it or not, and agree to disagree sometimes. And then the class was about the butt you’re kicking today might be the one you’re kissing tomorrow. So treat people with respect more than anything. But the parallels to me, there is no difference. We have different playing fields. But if culture eats, strategy for lunch is the quote. And establishing a culture where people feel valued and people feel heard is really, really important, obviously.
Kortney Harmon [00:12:51]:
And all of that plays into what I’m seeing on a lot of businesses today is the lack of engagement or the lack of retention. And all of these things are things that foster those positive relationships, those positive engagements, those positive long term lifelong employees. You don’t hear anybody that is like, oh, I’m going to retire from this place, because they probably just feel like a transaction and we don’t want them to feel like that. Right?
Julie Jones [00:13:15]:
They say you can either be a transformational or a transactional leader. Transformational allows people to grow. You care about them. Growing leadership starts with you. You have to be able to lead yourself first. And my thing always was that if I’m going to ask you to do something, I need to be able to do it as well. Now, pitching no, right? But even with conditioning. Right. I used to run things with you all.
Kortney Harmon [00:13:44]:
Running 5 miles before we even got to practice most days.
Julie Jones [00:13:47]:
Yes, but I thought it was important that you knew that. I knew that it was important. Right. And if I was going to ask you to follow our drinking rules during a certain part of the time, then that was the rule that stuck for me as well. Those things walking the walk is vitally important as a leader. I truly believe that because I always felt like you were going to treat each other the way that I treated you. That makes a difference, too, I think.
Kortney Harmon [00:14:13]:
Absolutely. I agree with that. And I think that just starts everything off the right way within your businesses. So let’s talk about lessons learned. What lessons from coaching can business leaders apply when trying to get the most out of their employees? Obviously, we talked about some of these things. We talked about the communication. Are there anything other lessons from coaching that business leaders can think of to maybe help their employees excel within their own business teams, whether it’s under a certain manager or overall under their umbrella of their organization?
Julie Jones [00:14:42]:
I think the biggest lesson, and I’ll take this just from the recent Women’s World Cup okay, so England advanced to the quarterfinals. This is a big deal, obviously we’re out of it, unfortunately. But their star player was suspended for two games because she stomped on the back. I think they were playing Nigeria or Morocco, one of the two, I can’t remember. But she stomped on the back of one of the players that was down on the ground in response or frustration or whatever it was. And I read a quote about it. One of her teammates said, well, she’s know, and she lost her mind for a minute. But the key predictor of peak performance is being available. Right? She’s not available. It doesn’t matter how good she is. She’s not available to help her team now advance. And she had scored three goals through the tournament. I haven’t followed what’s going on since I’d read this and sort of dove into this a little bit. But this is going to drastically affect the team. And the reason I bring this up is because her response to whatever had happened was not appropriate for the team. And this is a huge lesson. Spider man says, with great power comes great responsibility. I turn that around and we say, with great response ability. The ability to respond comes great power. How we respond to everything that happens around us changes what happens next. This kid stomps on another player’s back, she gets a red card, she’s gone. Changes the tone of the rest of the tournament for her team because she lost control. And this happens in teams all the time. You see it. You’ve been part of it, you’ve seen it. I mean, if we can manage our responses to things and that’s what athletes have to do moment by moment, because you can’t freak out every single time something goes wrong. Think about it. If every time you threw a ball, you stomped your foot, threw your hands up to the umpire and turned around and complained to your teammates, how many strikes do you think you would have.
Kortney Harmon [00:16:40]:
Got called unless it was down the plate and it was set over the fence? None. Right.
Julie Jones [00:16:43]:
Because everyone’s now irritated with you. Right? Like, the umpire thinks you’re an idiot. Right. Your catcher is like, oh, my gosh. And the batter is like, okay, little crybaby, I’m going to kill you. So our response makes a huge difference. And I think that’s one lesson that athletes have to learn early, they’re not always good at it, but the good ones are. The good ones are. Think of if LeBron James well, he’s sort of a crybaby sometimes, but we’re going to go with it anyway. But if he reacted every single time, every single time, they’d never get through a game. But if you look at the real masters, like Cal Ripken, some of these guys that are just Drew Brees, these guys that are just even Tom Brady a little bit of a cry baby, but still, they don’t complain about they respond. There’s a difference. I think that’s a great lesson that should be used every day in business. The way we respond to everyday things that happen to us either erodes or builds respect.
Kortney Harmon [00:17:43]:
That’s true. That’s not only true as individual contributors in a business, but that’s managers, how frequently your people come to you to talk to you or you as a CEO or a leader, how connected you are, is how you’re reacting. Responding to all of the above. I love that I would have been sat if I would have done any of those things. But anyway, so talk about mental obstacles. This is obviously a mental obstacle, whether it’s lack of awareness to say, oh, that person’s young. But what are some other common mental obstacles that you’ve seen both athletes and business people face? And really, when you say those, how do you overcome those? Because it’s really a part of first is the awareness, right. That’s step one of this process. But how do you overcome it at that point? What other mental obstacles have you seen?
Julie Jones [00:18:26]:
Well, you make a very good point there, Court, that self awareness is our superpower. We talk about that all the time with my athletes and everyone that I work with. I write a tip every Monday. They’re called mindset made simple tips. And you can get [email protected] blog. But this week’s tip was about impostor syndrome. And the reason that I chose this week to talk about is because school starting and all of these people are going back either as a professor, as a coach, as a new freshman. And we question whether or not we are worthy of doing what we do and whether someone’s going to find out that we’re not as good as people think we are as we need to be. That’s one major thing. I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the four people they were talking about that were talking about imposter syndrome were these viola Davis, how to get away with murder, maya Angelou, the greatest poet of our time, michelle Obama, the former first lady, and Tom Hanks. All these people talk openly about their imposter syndrome. And I thought, well, no wonder the rest of us, if they think that.
Kortney Harmon [00:19:30]:
About them, no wonder. I feel like how?
Julie Jones [00:19:33]:
Right? Exactly. There are so many ways that we can manage that, though. One of the things that I talked about in the Tip this week was to look for small ways to win. Kevin Coakley, who’s a professor at Michigan State, says that he, like, stalks himself to see how many people are using his research to make sure that he realizes, okay, I am contributing and visualizing ourselves. Do what we do is important as well, like sort of pre experiencing. We’ll talk a little bit more about that, but there are so many ways that we can manage those things. But imposter syndrome is one of them. And dealing with the inability to rebound is something that happens. So in sport, a kid strikes out and they carry that out to the field or they bring that back to the next at bats. We’ve got to be able to refocus and reset. And that happens in business too. You get a no and you have to turn around and go right back to work. How do we move from the no to a mindset that’s going to set us up for success? So these refocus techniques that we use in athletics are it’s the same thing because this is not different. Our brain is helpful and it’s very hurtful. It doesn’t like, change. It’s trained to react instead of respond. We don’t control our thoughts. They just come in. We control what we do with them. And we have a negativity bias. We can find a problem in everything. That’s what coaches are great at. That not a gift, but that’s what coaches do. Like, okay, how do I fix this even when it doesn’t need fixed? No. Yeah, but I think all of these things, the way we talk to ourselves is a huge issue. And you talk to yourself more than you talk to anybody else. And we don’t talk enough about how that affects our success.
Kortney Harmon [00:21:14]:
I love that, and I think that’s so true, especially in our world of staffing and recruiting. You get a reaction, you get a no, you get told, whatever, someone had a bad day, their dog just got ran over, and they take that out on you. It’s not your fault by any means. But how do you get over that? That contributes to phone reluctance. You never want to get on the phone again. You don’t want to pick it up. You don’t want to reach out to somebody. But being able to reset is huge. You may be talking about this later, but do you have any tips for people to help reset, whether it’s a bad commission month or a bad phone call or a bad review, whatever that might look like? Do you have any tips to overcome those?
Julie Jones [00:21:51]:
I do. I think we do a lot of different things. And one thing that we do, even after if you had a bad review, it’s very important to look back at that review and pull out anything that was positive. The only thing you’re going to hear in fact, your teammate Anna, one day at practice came to me, and she said, you know, Coach, you never say anything positive to me. I mean, I was like, Coach, who who are you talking to? Right? I’m the only one standing. I mean, in my head, I’m thinking, Are you kidding me? And I ran down the things that I had told her that day of what she had done well, but in the midst of those, I had told her something that she didn’t do well. And she hung on to that like it was the only thing I ever said to her whole entire life. And I said, did you hear me say all these things? And she’s like, I guess that’s normal. So you go into your review or evaluation or whatever it is, or you come off the phone with someone who says, no, there is something in there that went well. One example I use all the time is Kobe Bryant, right? So he talks about losing as exciting, said only by someone who didn’t lose that much, of course. Right. But he says losing is exciting because it allows you to see the places that you need to shore up. He says if you evaluate wins and losses the same, you don’t go on this roller coaster. So the technique that we use there is called a well better how. So what went well? There’s always something. And if you have to force yourself to look for something, then you start to notice things a little bit more rapidly as well. Because we have a negativity bias, right. We’re not attuned to doing this. We have to find things. We just say, oh, yeah, I did that. Not, yes, I did that. It’s like, yeah, okay. But when someone tells you something bad, you’re like, you throw a lot of emotion that way, right? And we remember things that are tied to emotion. So we need to, okay, what did I do well? And I make my teams and the people I work with do that. Give me three things. They could be tiny. Three things that either they said went well or, you know, you did well. Three things. Okay, those are well. And then we find one thing, one major what’s the success factor? What is that major success factor? What’s that one thing that we need to do better if we want to make a major jump? And then we go to, as Dr. Ziegler used to say, by doing what right. Okay, you got this idea, but how are you going to get there? By doing what it’s the how one way. What is one thing you can do today that will help you do the better? And we use the three to one ratio because it’s called the winners ratio. It’s called Lasada line. Teams that have positive communications, three to one ratio, that line, the teams above that line flourish, and the teams below that line, they fall apart.
Kortney Harmon [00:24:43]:
Really?
Julie Jones [00:24:44]:
Yeah. The higher you go in the ratio, the better the higher success people find.
Kortney Harmon [00:24:49]:
I love that. It’s mind blowing. I mean, I think I vaguely remember Anna saying that, but to realize you’re in the moment. And one of the things that I like to tell people when you go into a review I do this myself, too, is you have week to week stuff. We have week to week meetings. I write down all of my wins, my week to week. Those wins translate into a long, excel sheet. So when I come to review time, it’s like, what did I do? Well, I don’t really remember what I did because, honestly, you’re doing so many things all at once. You’re doing so many things over the course of the quarter. Keep track. My grandma used to call it a breadboard. Keep your breadboard, know what you’re doing, know what you’re doing well because only the bad things are going to stick out to you. So I love the idea of that three to one.
Julie Jones [00:25:31]:
What you say there, Courtney, is so important, and that says so much about how you have managed your mindset over the years. Right? You have never been afraid to put a brag board together, which then allows you to have the confidence to go and do things that you’re not certain that you can do. But we talked the other day when we were a short conversation. Can it be that hard? That’s sort of the mindset you have. But it’s because we call it an evidence journal. Write down three things that have gone well today. This is your evidence journal. You are building evidence to prove that, number one, you’re moving forward. Number two, you have earned where you are. So you’re fighting your imposter syndrome with this daily. Right. You’re reminding yourself that you are making progress, that you are giving value to the world, whatever it is that is important to you. This evidence journal. And then the good thing is, on the day that you feel like dookie dook, you can go back and look at these things and say, you know what? Yeah, I’ve earned my this is me. And we use this as well, too. This is me. When. Something goes well, you say, yes, that’s me. When something doesn’t go well, that’s not me. It’s how we sort of assess what happens to us. Are we an optimist or are we a pessimist? And the pessimist is, okay, it has to be something wrong with me. It’s me, it’s me, it’s me. The optimist is like, oh, no, this is just circumstantial. I’ll do better the next time. That’s you. That’s who you are.
Kortney Harmon [00:26:56]:
Yeah. I still fight imposter syndrome daily. I think it’s a thing that we all kind of doubt, but what are the steps that we’re taking to ensure we don’t feel that way? So you talked a little bit about visualization, and I love this, so I want to get into it a little bit deeper. How can visualization and mental imagery techniques used in sports help business leaders to visualize success? I’m not going to lie. The thing that comes in my head was when you were making us literally practice the end of the game when we were in college, to, say, practicing being winning a championship. I thought it was the dumbest thing ever at the time that we were doing it. But I totally see how that is evident in how it plays in our day to day, how we figure out where we’re going. But I’m going to let you talk about this because I’m curious how you relate this to business.
Julie Jones [00:27:45]:
Oh, it is so relatable to business, mental rehearsal, and if we think about it, so visualization imagery, whatever you want to call it, I think an overarching great term is mental rehearsal because we’re rehearsing, we’re pre experiencing the things that we’re about to do. Every time I give a lot of presentations, and I love giving presentations. And every single time before I do, I ask as many questions about the venue, about who’s going to be there, and I think about what I’m going to wear, if I’m going to have a microphone in my hand, or if I’m going to have the clip mic or nothing at all. Am I going to have my slides where I can see them? Are they going to be behind me? What’s this going to look like? And then I go there, think about how I’m going to feel, think about what the room is going to feel like. Literally, I pre experience the entire thing before I ever get there, so that when I get there, I have primed my brain. I’ve already experienced it. So here’s proof that visualization works. And I’ll get a little bit more into the techniques. They did a study at the Cleveland Clinic, and they had three groups of people. So they have the control group, of course, which we know doesn’t do just we measure against the control. They took another group, they’re trying to increase fitness, and they had them watch a exercise video. We’ll just say Insanity, one of my all time favorites, and they did the exercise, right? So you know you’re getting your butt kicked if you’re doing shanti. Then they had another group that they had watched the same video but they just imagined themselves doing the exercise. The group that did the exercise obviously increased their fitness by a significant amount. The group that imagined themselves exercising, sitting down or standing up, whichever, they’re watching the 30 minutes video, however long, it is the same amount of time that the people that actually did it, they increased their fitness by 13% just by.
Kortney Harmon [00:29:33]:
Visualizing themselves doing it, but not really.
Julie Jones [00:29:35]:
They did not physically, intentionally move a muscle.
Kortney Harmon [00:29:38]:
13% is huge for nothing.
Julie Jones [00:29:41]:
Mind blowing. Mind blowing. Think about what this can do for people who can’t move. This is a ridiculous mind. They did another study. I can’t remember who did the study, but about they had people do a pass on the piano and they practiced the same amount of time, one mentally, one for real. They found that the motor cortex changed exactly the same for both people. Right? I mean, you can go on and on about these studies, but the bottom line is when we’re imagining doing something, our brain is still sending the impulses to the muscles and the different parts of the brain or the different parts of the body that we are going to be using, they just aren’t as strong as when we’re actually doing it. When we are immersing ourselves in a pre experience, we are priming our brain and our body. It is practicing whether it’s a conversation. I work with a student athlete at Charleston Southern University and she was in the lineup and then she was out of the lineup and she needed to talk to her know, talking to the coach is right. What’s she going to know? This is going to be horrible because here we go, setting ourselves up for success big time with these thoughts. I said, okay, her name is Weslin. I said, Weslin, here’s what I need you to do. I need you to think about talking to coach and I need you to think about what you’re going to say and I want you to imagine yourself doing this. I want you to rehearse it and I want you to think about all the responses that she could give back to you. And then I want you to rehearse your response to all of her, the possibilities of what could happen. So she does this and she came back and we talked the next day and she said, I am so glad that I went through that exercise because she did not respond in the way that I wanted her to. But I already knew how I would feel because I had rehearsed it. I could then be aware of my feeling and go with my if. Then these are called implementation intentions. If this happens, then this is what I’m going to do. Think about how that can help you in business. And you’ve already rehearsed it. So you know what your response is. You’re not going to be like Drew Brees says, it’s like having the answers to the test before the test.
Kortney Harmon [00:31:45]:
A light bulb just went off for me. And I understand. So in all of my years of learning and development, I have been a nerd when it comes to roleplayer improv sessions. And it’s usually in our industry about responding to resistance. If someone’s going to tell you these are the only eight reasons they’re going to tell you no, how are you going to respond to them? I literally just put that back to my sports background of why. Because it’s literally the practice. There’s no fear, there’s no reluctance, there’s no anything but this goes for recruiting and for sales. Light bulb. I love that. And I know why I like that so much. Based on your explanation, right?
Julie Jones [00:32:19]:
I mean, think about it. You had to respond if you threw 120 pitches in the game. You had to respond every single time you had practiced that and practiced that with overcoming your frustration even in practice. Or remember one of the time I told you I was going to nail your toe to the rubber because you were stepping off just a little? Were you were practicing in your head. In fact, I’m going to talk to a high school football team and a college football team this evening, and our rule for visualization is going to be this. This is what Jack Nicholas did, the best golfer ever. He never stepped up to take his putt until he saw himself make the putt first. That was his rule. So our guys cannot go up to the line until they have watched themselves run the play perfectly the way they want to. Because we make our own mind movies. No one else is making them, so we can make them whatever we want. Unfortunately, we usually make them with a mistake in them or think of what we can’t do, but we can make them. So this is our rule. When they step to the line, this is the rule. You have to see it before you can go. And now at least our body knows what we are expecting of it.
Kortney Harmon [00:33:27]:
I love that this kind of plays into the same kind of question. How can practicing mindfulness and being present in the moment help both athletes and business people perform under pressure? We talked about those role plays. We talked about people saying no. How does that help long term?
Julie Jones [00:33:42]:
Well, if you think about the anxiety you’ve had in your life, it’s because of the story you’re telling yourself about what’s going to happen or what just happened, rather than what’s happening right now. If you ask yourself if the world could be falling down around you in your future mind, or could have fallen down around you in your past mind. But if you ask yourself, am I okay right now. Yeah. Right. I’m in my office. You’re in your office? I am okay right now. An hour ago, if I was thinking about this podcast and I started to worry about it, I would have thought, I’m not okay. But I was okay. I was standing at my desk exactly like I am now. Being present is everything with performance. We are amazing time travelers. We’d like to spend a lot of time in the future. We like to spend a lot of time in the past. If we are either place, we are not focusing on what we can do right now. If you watch ted last, I love mean. Okay. I have a ted lasso freak, right?
Kortney Harmon [00:34:43]:
Like business and learning and overall wholesome good ideas and strategies and it’s touching.
Julie Jones [00:34:50]:
And hysterical and his Ted Lasso isms are like the greatest. But the one thing he talks about when he’s got his four things right about in the last season, he says, what does this situation require of me now? And we talk about it with everyone I work with. Of what’s your win? What’s important now? That’s the only thing that you can manage, right? Our body only performs in the present. Our mind goes all over the place. It goes back there, it goes ahead. But if we can wrangle it to stay right now, we are going to be so much more successful. Not what is she going to say? Listen to what she’s saying or what he’s saying so that then you can respond appropriately and our response influences what happens next. But no, not us. We want to pitch two pitches ahead or take two pitches from behind and let it affect what’s going on right now. But everything has a life of its own, right? Every moment has a life of its own. I talk all the time about managing moments. That’s how you build momentum, being present. And the one great way we always have access to this at every moment is to breathe. Because you can only breathe in the moment. It is the anchor to the present. If we breathe way too much, if we can slow our breathing down, we could do a whole podcast on how to breathe in meetings and stressful situations if we need to get pumped up. But our breath can manage our physiology. Our breath changes the way that we think. It changes our ability to see. It changes our heart rate. If you can manage your breath, you can manage your environment 100%. Powerful. Very powerful.
Kortney Harmon [00:36:33]:
I love it. We might have to do a part two just on breathing because I love that. That’s so true. So you talked about what you were talking about is essentially I love that you said time travelers, but mental toughness to be able to stay in the moment, right? So what strategies do you teach to build mental toughness resilience for when people actually do face challenges?
Julie Jones [00:36:54]:
Well, again, mental toughness is really about being able to manage whatever is right in front of you. Because if I can get through this moment, then I can go on to the next moment. And I call it scan and snipe. If I can scan, observe the landscape. When we were at Akron, we call it an OTL. Observe the landscape, because if you’re not observing the landscape, then you’re observing what’s going on in here. And then we get they call it navel gazing, right? We’re so involved in our own head, and that’s where our problems begin, when we need to have a conversation. Obviously, if we’ve pre experienced it, we want to sort of let our subconscious take over a little bit, but our doubt ignites our conscious brain, which makes us think too much, and then we can’t just let things flow. But going back to your question of mental toughness, it’s about being able to refocus. It’s about being able to refocus. It’s about being able we put all the tools I use around three main tenets, number one tenet of mental toughness. Your power comes from your ability to choose one thought over the other. Is this thought helping me? If you have to ask that question, it’s probably not. But it’s not about suppressing thoughts. We’re not saying like, oh, no, I’m not nervous. Okay, you’re nervous, fine. Your body’s getting you fired up for something, right? That’s a good thing. Suppressing your thoughts, like trying to hold a beach ball down underneath the water, eventually you’re going to get tired, and it’s going to come up and it’s go it’s about saying, okay, but this would help me better. It’s about replacing or introducing a different thought. So that’s number one. Number two, obviously go back to your responsibility, your ability to respond. How can I respond to this right now? That’s going to make the next thing better, that’s toughness. And then the third thing is just being able to manage your state. You can change your physiology in an instant. If I made you visualize a lemon and think about it and really sort of dive into, okay, this lemon, oh, it’s yellow and beautiful and juicy, and I made you say, okay, now suck all the juice out of that lemon. If you really thought about it, you can make your mouth water, right?
Kortney Harmon [00:38:58]:
I just suckered thinking of it.
Julie Jones [00:39:00]:
Right? So that’s how powerful your mind is. You can change your physiology at any moment, and there are times when you need to chill, and then there are times when you need to get fired up. These are choices. It’s not determined by anybody else. It’s determined by you. And then lastly, if I was going to add one more, it would be having routines and habits of excellence, right? Routines are things that allow us to bring certainty into uncertainty. And every time you go into the conversation when you’re trying to sell something or when you’re recruiting, it’s uncertain. So your routine gives you comfort and consistency, which then allows you to feel more confident in these uncertain situations. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that just went into that. But that mental toughness piece, choosing one thought over the other, your ability to respond, being able to manage your state, and then having routines and habits of excellence, those four things are what go into mental toughness in our assessment and how we work with people 100%.
Kortney Harmon [00:40:01]:
And that last piece is huge for us because every part of our business is uncertain. It’s all no. We live in a human world and we have to deal with the person that we’re talking to. But how do you ensure success? A, you can’t, but B, your preparedness of your knowledge, the questions you’re asking, the system that you’re using to ensure that you’re tracking things for the best way, those are all the things that play foundationally into long term success. So controllable one thing at a time. I think I saw a video just the other day. It was Navy Seals or it was one of the elite. One of the drill instructors was talking. The people were talking about this one being one of the nicest guys, but he wasn’t necessarily nice, but it was like, you’re going to go through eight months of crap if you can just put off quitting till tomorrow.
Julie Jones [00:40:47]:
You’ll make it. That’s right.
Kortney Harmon [00:40:49]:
And I love that. I mean, it’s literally just one decision over the next. I’ll quit tomorrow, not today. Or I’ll do that bad thing tomorrow, not today. Having that mental stability, to be able to drive through just one thing at a time is amazing.
Julie Jones [00:41:02]:
Well, you’ve talked a lot already about process over outcome. When we screw up, it’s because we’re thinking about the outcome. What’s she going to say? If I’m thinking about what you’re going to ask me next, how can I possibly be thinking about what I need to say? To answer the question we’re dealing with right now? You can’t be focused on the goal and the means at the same time. We’re in Germany, actually, we’re in Switzerland, and we were up at the top of this mountain and it was gorgeous. And then the storm came, right? So now we’ve got to walk back down, then go down this gondola, which I hate. I hate heights. So I’m thinking I’ll go now the gondolas be going. I started thinking about I’m like, okay, stop. Take one step on the path. One step on the path. And then I looked up and I said, we need to go. I started to look ahead and then I almost fell on my butt, right? So it’s like literally about taking the next step. And obviously we have to have a long term goal. There’s no doubt about it. But if we’re focused on that, all the know winners in my favorite quote, I was going to say it wrong. Losers have goals. Winners have systems. Scott Adams, I’ll give him the credit for that. But if you’re not focused on process, you’re going nowhere. And this is all process oriented. We just allow ourselves to get out to the 30,000ft when we need to be 30ft ahead a lot of the time.
Kortney Harmon [00:42:18]:
I love that. I really like that quote. I might be putting that in my arsenal of tools. So thank you. Burnout. It’s inevitable. How can business leaders avoid burnout and sustain peak performance like athletes do over a long season? I mean, that’s a whole different mindset. We talked about mindset, so I’m sure that’s going to relate. How do they avoid burnout, especially? We’re going through uncertain times in our economy. We don’t necessarily people talk about the R word. We don’t know if we’re going to in a recession, an overcorrection, what that looks like. So how do our leaders and our businesses avoid burnout in a situation like this?
Julie Jones [00:42:52]:
Burnout is real, and I really feel like I didn’t know I experienced it as a coach, but I feel like I did. And a lot of that comes from all the things that are going on around us as well. The pressure you’ve lost people that are close to you, losing family members or dealing with your own family issues. All these things sort of weigh on us. And burnout is horrible for our performance because we are not energized. We are not communicating probably as much. We’re probably closing our door. But one of the best ways to manage burnout is to constantly go back to our why, and this is something you’ll appreciate this example. I’ve used this before when I was at Cleveland State. I didn’t have as much help, especially at first, and I did everything. So when kids came on campus for visits, I would walk them around. I’m certain that you spent all of your time on your visit with me. I’m certain. We walked around, we looked at the campus, we talked about everything, and we met the people, anne Coburn and Winnie and all the people that these names mean something to you, not to everyone else. But you meet the people and you talk about all the good things that Cleveland State has. I then go to the University of Akron, and I had a big staff, and I didn’t do all that. And we had amazing facilities. Our facilities were way better at the time. Like, just way better. We had good people, too. I didn’t go around and live that as often, right. I was stuck in my office more. I had other people do those things that made a difference on how I connected to where I was and what I was doing. At Cleveland State. I remembered. I was forced to remember. I didn’t think about this until I read The Happiness Advantage and they talked about people that work in the White House. They work 17 hours, days. They’re there all the time. And he said they need to remember the joy or the grandeur of working in the White House. I don’t care who’s leading the White House. It’s the White House. And people come in on tours and are like, this is amazing. But if you’re not thinking from that perspective, sometimes you totally get down to the weeds and you think, oh, my gosh, I’ve got all this. Why am I doing this? What’s special about this? But I remembered all the time why Cleveland State was special. Because I walked it and I lived it, and I showed you what was special about it. So it reminded me what was special about it. I didn’t do that at Akron nearly as much. I never took kids on the full tour of the campus, and there were so many good things that I forgot. Right. I wasn’t sharing all this wonderful stuff. And that makes a big difference in burnout. What is it that can you go back to why you love, like, ten years from now, will you still love doing this podcast? You’ll have to sort of go back and say, oh, my gosh, these are the reasons this fires me up. Tying back to the values of why you that’s huge. That’s absolutely huge. And then the other thing we talk about balancing thing. Successful people don’t balance stuff. They don’t.
Kortney Harmon [00:45:49]:
I’m not looking at the camera.
Julie Jones [00:45:52]:
You know it’s true.
Kortney Harmon [00:45:54]:
It is very true. It is.
Julie Jones [00:45:56]:
But we do have to look at where we spend our time and decide what’s most important. I highly recommend that people who feel Burnout make a list. Literally. This seems so ridiculous, but write down how you spend it every five minutes of your day.
Kortney Harmon [00:46:14]:
It’s an eye opening experience. I can say that because I’ve done it. I mean, anything from what you eat to how you spend your time to get your phone, to give you a readout of what you’re actually doing on it. And if it tells you you’re on your phone 7 hours a day or whatever, it’s like, oh, crap, no, there’s no way. But again, I go back to the first step, is admitting and understanding the realization of what you do now, I think this kind of goes hand in hand. I know we talked about burnout, life work, life, balance. I think that’s kind of where you’re going. I had a huge realization two years ago, me and my Type A personality. I want to be able to do everything, and I want to do everything well. That’s just who I am. Shocker, I know, but it was a realization that stress of everything, the burnouts, everything that I was giving my work, that was whatever. If it was 12 hours a day, what that looked like, I wasn’t giving my family. And people were asking me, Were you stressed out? And no. Physically, I’m like, no, I’m not stressed out. I’ve been in way more stressful situations. I pitched division One college ball.
Julie Jones [00:47:12]:
I’m good.
Kortney Harmon [00:47:13]:
I’m not stressed out. But in reality it was my body’s way of telling me I got sick and it was my body’s way of saying you are stressed, you need to slow down and if you don’t find a way to fix this, I’m going to find a way for you to slow down. I guess talk about that a little bit. How important is work life balance and self care? I know that goes for sports, but the people in the business world that are really trying to excel and make their name and their career, how important is that?
Julie Jones [00:47:40]:
We are constantly being pulled by what we are doing and what we think we should be doing and it sort of goes back to being present and this is something that we all strive to do. And I’m not good at this necessarily. I’ve gotten better since I’m not traveling all the time. I would be on the road and a month after my son was born, c section, mind you, I was on the road for a week. A month later, recruiting in Utah. And you’re constantly fighting this battle between and it’s almost like you have to make a deal with yourself that wherever you are, you’re going to be there. So you get done what you want to get done because what we do is we hang off the bus. We’re a part on the bus, we’re part off the bus because we sort of want to be off the bus but we really need to be on the bus. And then we’re getting roadburned all over the place and we’re miserable because we’ve got 1ft back there and our body over here. It’s about being present as much as anything, but it’s also about if we work hard, we’ve got to relax hard, right? We’ve got to rest hard because if we don’t rest exactly what you said, you are going to get sick. One great way to sort of reduce our overall stress response is to do and you can listen to Andrew Huberman, he does the Huberman Lab podcast. I love him. Yeah. But he talks about and this is something that we use in medical formats all the time. He talks about cyclic breathing. So it’s five minutes. That’s it. They have found through research that this is the best way to sort of lessen your overall stress response. Which means then when you go up against pressure, your stress response is already a little bit lower. So when you do peak, it’s not as high. So you started here maybe and then you would peak and go, shoot. Now you start and your peak might be similar, but it’s not as high because you started at a lower place. But this cyclic breathing is literally just breathing. So you breathe in, you’re breathing in through your nose and out through your nose or your mouth, whichever you prefer. But when you breathe, your belly goes in and out. So you’re doing diaphragmatic breathing, but you’re breathing in fully. And then once you have a full, full breath, you take one more hit, if you will, and then you exhale slowly and you do that for five minutes. I’ve done that with I’ve had a group of my people that I work with do that. And when I do it, I’m better because that’s self care. And it’s five minutes and we don’t feel bad about it. I get up at 06:00 A.m. During the school year. Right now, I get up at 630 because I don’t have to get up at six. I don’t know why that makes it seems like it’s better for me. The first thing I do after I drink my glass of water, which everyone should do to turn their brain on.
Kortney Harmon [00:50:17]:
With lemon, room temperature.
Julie Jones [00:50:19]:
Room temperature. I don’t do the lemon, but yes, with lemon, I work out, and I don’t feel bad about it because what I know is that if you look at the research of what moving does for you, I don’t care what you do moving wise, everyone around you is benefiting from that, not just you. So if we look at our self care as I’m giving back to the world, I think we’re not like, oh, my gosh, I don’t have time for this. You have to have time for this, or you have time for nothing. And you have time for what you want. You have time for what you want. You just act like you don’t have time for stuff. That’s me, too.
Kortney Harmon [00:50:54]:
But you have to plan. You have to prepare.
Julie Jones [00:50:55]:
What does your day look like?
Kortney Harmon [00:50:56]:
Plan your day. My biggest thing, especially in our industry, is plan your day the day before you start the next one. If you plan your day when you’re walking in at 08:00 A.m., you’re already behind the game. I know this probably is my athletic background 100%, but I want to know who I’m calling. I want to know what executives I’m calling. I want to know my call plan, because I want to be able to get that and then be prepared for the next day.
Julie Jones [00:51:16]:
Well, if you don’t do that, you can’t pre experience it, right? You can’t have the answers to the test before the test, because you have to have that done so that you can be imagining it. So I have a friend who is a surgeon, and I’ll talk about one of our friends who’s a surgeon as well in a minute. But she on the way to work every morning. She has three surgeries she doesn’t do very often, but they’re very important. So she runs through one of them on the way to work every morning just so that she is prepared for that. Drew Brees has a time had a time when he was playing a two mile stretch where he would go through the two minute offense or the. Hurry up offense. There’s a plan. There Jackie Miller, who played for us at Cleveland State. She’s a little bit before you, but you know Jackie. She goes through every surgery for her surgery, literally. She watches herself lay out her instruments, which she likes to do herself, so that she knows that everything’s there. Because she said, if I don’t see them in my mental rehearsal, if I don’t do it right, that means someone has to leave the or. They have to wash, scrub back in, and that person’s on the table longer than they need to be.
Kortney Harmon [00:52:20]:
Right?
Julie Jones [00:52:20]:
So that this is how vital these things are. So doing these things helps us. That’s self care. I use a four step performance cycle, right? So it’s approach, action, result, and response. So our approach sets us up for our actions. Our approach and our response are the two places we can get the most bang for our buck when we’re looking at our performance, right? So that approach is what we’re doing. If we can manage our approach, we are taking stress away. It sets us up for everything. Then we take our action because it’s already set up by our approach. Then we get a result. We don’t control the result. Even if we’re 100% prepared, doesn’t mean it’s not that whole thing. You work hard, you’re going to get it. Not necessarily. That’s not a truism. You work hard, you got a better chance, but there’s no guarantee. So that result, there’s no guarantee. But then we have to figure out how to respond to that result. And that response saves us time and energy because it keeps us on track to have a better approach for the next time. So all these things are self care crelate because we are managing what you mentioned, controllables. We’re controlling what we can control. And when we start to get out of control, it’s because we’re focused on the stuff that we have no control over. Right? Sometimes we can influence those things, but control, we’ve got to train ourselves. Okay, how do I manage these things? Because this is the stuff that’s making me crazy. Stuff I can’t even control.
Kortney Harmon [00:53:44]:
I love it. All right, I’m only going to ask two more because I know we’re already at an hour, so I know we could probably talk all day. Shocker. We talked about some daily habits. Is there any other daily habits or routine that you recommend business leaders adopt for optimal performance?
Julie Jones [00:53:58]:
You mentioned planning your day. I think doing a brain dump at the end of the day is really important so that you can rest when you go to bed. There’s nothing you can do. This is what I used to tell you guys, right when we step across the line and when we’re at practice, you can’t be worrying about your test because there’s nothing you can do about it for the next 2 hours.
Kortney Harmon [00:54:17]:
Right.
Julie Jones [00:54:18]:
We need to be here. Remember at the bottom of all of our rules. It said be there. I don’t know if you remember that, but it was be there. The only reason I remember that is because Julie, my old assistant, used to make fun of me because I’d be there. Beware. I’m like, be there. Be wherever we’re supposed to be, that’s where we need to be. We need to be there. And when we were at Akron, in the dugout, it said, the only place this is the paraphrase, but you can only be here now, so be here. So dumping all the things that are on your mind onto a piece of paper, there’s power in writing it down. There’s a book called The Power of Writing it down. You should read it. It’s actually really good. But writing things down allows you to think about, okay, do I need to be as worried about it as I really am? Number one, and if you write it down, you’re not going to worry about forgetting about it, which spends a lot of energy.
Kortney Harmon [00:55:02]:
That makes sense, right?
Julie Jones [00:55:03]:
Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh. All these things. But if we write it down and then another practice. We haven’t talked about the power of gratitude, but having a gratitude journal changes a lot about burnout, about your performance, about you looking for things that are good. My coach used to always say, she’d call me Jay Jay, you do things ten times, and if you do it right nine times and you do it wrong one time, you remember the one time. She’s like, you need to remember the nine. Focus on the nine. We don’t do that by nature, but a gratitude journal makes us sit down at the end of every day, and it takes two minutes and write down three things that you’re grateful for or three things that went well, whatever it is. And then after that, you write down your affirmation. I am the leading mental performance coach in the country or in women’s athletics or in women’s business, or, I am the leading recruiter. I am the leading podcast host in business, whatever it is. And there are nights that you are not going to feel like that. But if you write it down, every night, you think of one thing, then to say, yes, okay, this is why I am, or, this is what I’m going to do tomorrow to move me one step closer to that. But there’s so much power in that. And then almost like your evidence journal or your brag board, sometimes I’ll sit and flip through and I’m like, oh, my gosh, I remember that. And now we are just flooding our brain with serotonin and dopamine, and that’s the molecule of more. It wants us to look for more good stuff, and it helps us relive these wonderful things that we’ve already lived, and we’re just adding amazing experience to the experience we’ve already had. And it sets us up for more of that. That gratitude journal is huge.
Kortney Harmon [00:56:46]:
I love that. I just watched a movie, and that was literally one of the main focus that they were talking about. And they had an awful morning. They were out hiking. It was on a Netflix movie. I was watching it while I was in the sauna. And it was literally the idea is like, well, what are you grateful for? There was nothing to be grateful for. The morning was awful. Well, no, the coffee was warm, whatever it was. But look at the little things. I don’t do that. That, I guess what I might be doing after we have this conversation.
Julie Jones [00:57:11]:
We tried to implement this in our house, and I need to get back to it. We’ve been on vacation all summer, seems like. But when we complain, when you catch yourself complaining, if you can immediately say something that you’re grateful for, number one, you’ll realize how much you complain, and number two, you’ll realize how much you have to be grateful for. And then another thing that this is huge for the office, but this is something that I talk with my teams about. And this was from Trevor Moad, who wrote it’s called the Book. It takes what it takes he was a mental performance coach. He worked with Russell Wilson and other people. But he has the rule, and this is something that I have adopted, is stop saying stupid stuff out loud. And he uses a different word for stuff. But if we can stop saying stupid stuff out loud about whatever it is that we’re doing because I hate this drill. We’re doing the dang drill anyway. Just freaking do it. We’re doing it. I hate these meetings. You have to go to this stupid meeting anyway. Stop saying stupid stuff out loud. Because, again, you’re just feeding into this negativity. And if you can say, I am going to learn something in this meeting today, think about the difference of how you go into that meeting and what you get out of it.
Kortney Harmon [00:58:16]:
That’s huge.
Julie Jones [00:58:17]:
Yes, it is huge.
Kortney Harmon [00:58:19]:
Last question before we wrap up is what is one more piece of advice that you’d give for mental performance advice overall to business leaders to succeed that you haven’t already told us?
Julie Jones [00:58:31]:
As we think about that whole mindset shift, one last thing that I think that you can implement immediately to change your performance is this. Every single time your mind goes to what if. What comes after a what if? Normally, usually not the good stuff. If you change what if to imagine if. Think about the difference in the weight of those two questions. What if this happens? What if they say no? What if they reject me? What if I get a bad review? Imagine if they say yes. Imagine if what I’ve done has made an impact. Imagine if, again, words are tools. They predict and perpetuate our performance. That’s a trevor Moed quote right there. Words are tools. They predict and perpetuate our performance. They also become pictures of what we see. So if we say, what if we are ordering what we don’t want off the menu, if we say, imagine if we are ordering exactly what we want off the menu. And you never go into Chipotle and tell them, I don’t want, I don’t want, I don’t want. But you constantly talk to yourself in that way. Don’t strike out. Don’t say something stupid. Now we’re telling ourselves we’re dialing up what we want. We’re seeing what we want and we’re saying what we want and we have a better chance of getting what we want instead of talking about what we’re trying to avoid. And that’s where our mind goes. We talk about what we’re trying to avoid incessantly. And that’s not the mindset we want to work from. That’s not peak performance.
Kortney Harmon [01:00:03]:
I love it. This is great. Obviously, I have some self reflection to do after our conversation today.
Julie Jones [01:00:09]:
Do not tell my husband. Chad does not listen only when he’s like, coming in in the back and entering the trash can. Oh, I love it.
Kortney Harmon [01:00:20]:
Well, thank you so much. This was inspirational to me. And thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day. I know our team here at Crelate is going to get to benefit from you here in the end of September as well. So thank you for taking the time to sit down with me.
Julie Jones [01:00:35]:
Thank you for inviting me. This is, again, like I said, I am just honored. I was on vacation with my family and we were talking about the excitement of this and we brought up so many good memories of you as an athlete and you as a human being. And watching you grow has just been an amazing experience. And one of the greatest joys of being a coach is watching those that you have gotten to know so fully, right, so fully turn into these amazing they were already amazing human beings when they were with you. And then just to watch them grow and be a part of what you’re doing now the teacher has become the student, and that’s just a great opportunity. Thank you so much.
Kortney Harmon [01:01:14]:
Well, I am who I am today partly because of who you were and what I got to go through with you. So thank you. And for our listeners, I hope you were able to gain some valuable perspective, some motivation by hearing Julie talk about her experiences not only leading teams, but businesses. The parallels are uncanny, truly, between sports and business from strong communication, collaboration, vision setting, tendencies, resilience, continuous improvement. So turn your what ifs to imagine.
Julie Jones [01:01:43]:
Ifs.
Kortney Harmon [01:01:44]:
And if you enjoyed our podcast, make sure you check out more episode of the Full Desk Experience. You can find us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen. Thanks again, Coach Jones, for your inspiration. And thank you to our listeners. Until next time, keep striving for greatness in everything you do. I’m Courtney Harmon with Crelate. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Industry Spotlight, a new series from the Full Desk Experience. New episodes will be dropping monthly. Be sure you’re subscribed to our podcast so you can catch the next Industry Spotlight episode and all episodes of the Full Desk Experience here or wherever you listen.
