This week on the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are joined by Dr Nate Zinsser. Dr Zinsser is an expert in the psychology of human performance and has worked at the forefront of applied sports psychology for over 30 years. His research has been published in several journals and in the widely used textbook ‘Applied Sport Psychology: Personal Growth to Peak Performance’. Dr Zinsser is the director of the performance psychology programme at West Point (The United States Military Academy) where he has been the lead performance psychologist since 1992, personally conducting over seventeen thousand individual training sessions and seven hundred team training sessions for cadets seeking the mental edge for athletic, academic, and military performance.

Nate Zinsser’s book ‘The Confident Mind, a Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance’ was published in 2022. 

0.00 Introduction

2.29 Could you give us a picture of what West Point is? 

5.46 How has the field of performance psychology evolved during your 30 years as director at West Point?

11.15 Can you take us through some of the building blocks of the skills that you have brought from the world of sports psychology into the military?

13.49 Can you give us an example of something that you did that would have been quite counterintuitive to the culture at West point at the time?

16.15 Have the values and culture at West Point changed as a result of the work you’ve been doing?

19.18 How do you help somebody who feels that they don’t belong here? 

24.03 What do you mean by confidence, and what can we do to help ourselves and others become more confident?

27.45 From a practical perspective, what do you do to help people who are at an inflection point in their career to build confidence?

31.35 During your time at West Point, have you seen a change in the self-awareness and the knowledge around psychology and performance science in the cadets who come into the college?

34.40 Tell us about your new book ‘The Confident Mind’

39.19 What would you say to a leader who is struggling to help someone on their team increase their confidence?

42.02 How do we bring up confident children?

46.32 What is exciting you right now? Where is your attention at the moment? 

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production. 

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