Coaching Athletes on Emotions

Alex Auerbach is a Licensed Counseling and Sport Psychologist, he’s a Certified Mental Performance Consultant and Board-Certified Coach working in professional sports. He’s worked with elite teams and performers from a range of domains, including the NBA and the NFL, Olympians, Army Special Forces, Fortune 5 companies, and venture-backed start-ups. Currently, he is the Senior Director of Wellness and Development for the Toronto Raptors.

In this conversation, we do a deep dive into the world of Sport Psychology, we talk a lot about leadership and culture, and how individuals in teams need to work from the inside out and develop the mindset they need to be at their best, and how environments can impact us from the outside in. Alex is my kind of thinker. He loves to think about and research and study science and best practices that exist in psychology. We both are extremely curious and passionate about what makes teams great and how do we create environments for individuals to unlock their potential.

Alex had a number of amazing insights during our conversation. Some of them include:

“We need to position the people around athletes and peak performers to facilitate the performance, to be enhancing of performance” (5:45).

“Athletes report the single biggest thing stopping them from peak performance is the organizational stuff” (6:30).

“The environment is responsible for developing talent” (6:55).

“I wish I could say there was one right way to do it, but this is just the way that it works for me” (11:00).

“My role is to make sure everyone has what they need from a mental health standpoint and a mental performance standpoint. That also means that I’m not all things to all people; I can’t be all things to all people” (13:15).

“To be an elite athlete requires a really really high degree of self-regulation” (17:30).

“Mental health is the foundation of peak performance” (20:30).

“Taking care of your mental health is about leaving more room for you to be a peak performer” (21:40).

“We’re all feeling something all the time” (24:15).

“[Emotion] is a part of the human experience. We’re not going to get rid of it, we’re not going to fight it” (24:25).

“Acceptance is if in fact there is nothing you can do to change the situation, then it is being willing to sit with the discomfort as long as you’re moving towards something that you care about” (27:10).

“Making the main thing the main thing is really important” (31:20).

“The people who are happiest are the people whose experience matches their expectations” (33:50).

“Norms are what you accept” (38:45).

“A leader is a person who’s willing to use themselves to help others get better” (52:05).

“The best teammates are the ones who are [leading] behind the scenes, under the radar, who know what buttons to push and levers to pull to get the most out of their teammates” (53:30).

“You can win a championship one year without leadership. I’m not sure you can build a dynasty without leadership” (53:45).

“My [unfair advantage] is being able to see a system and break it down in parts and see how things fit together and identify what levers to pull and things to move that can make a big change and do it in a behind the scenes way” (59:50).

“Adversity does tend to bring out people’s real strengths” (1:03:10).

“The people who have the best time at work are the people who get to use a strength every day and people who generally feel energized by what they’re getting to do, and the two go hand-in-hand” (1:05:30).

Additionally, you can follow Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also find the Unfair Advantage website here

Thank you so much to Alex for coming on the podcast!

I wrote a book called “Shift Your Mind” that was released in October of 2020, and you can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongskills.co/. If you liked this episode and/or any others, please follow me on Twitter: @brianlevenson or Instagram: @Intentional_Performers.

Thanks for listening.