#309: Ben Zobrist, 2x World Series Champion – Prepare for pressure

23:43But a more simple way to realize when it's starting to get at you is you have to pay close attention to your emotional reactions. Particularly if you don't have a way to check in with your emotions with anybody in your life. And this is probably not necessarily family members. You can do it with family members, but you probably need a safe place where you can say how you feel and it's not going to impact that other person's day in any way. Right. So generally within your family, you are somewhat codependent with the people in your family. So that means if I'm having an emotional challenge and I share that with you and you're in my family, there's a good chance you might have some fear or some worry or might cause you to have feelings about it too.

24:29Sometimes you have to be able to share that with somebody who their day isn't going to be up or down based on hearing that. That would be a nonjudgmental party that you can share exactly what you're feeling. Now, if you don't check in regularly, that's not a surprise. A lot of high achievers do not do that. But if you don't do it, what you'll start to realize is some smaller things at work will start to bother you more. Like little things, all of a sudden you'll get a big reaction. Could be road rage, could be something small that you normally can handle the up and down and it doesn't affect you that much.

25:06If it's starting to affect you more, there's a really good chance there's some stuff bottled up and you need to start sharing it out loud. And there is scientific evidence that if you share it out loud in a place of trust, that person I was talking about or a group that I was talking about. If you're able to do that, it takes a little bit of the edge off. And if you do that regularly, you'll start to realize it's a regular, it's a way that you can prepare, put it into your routine and make yourself more ready to deal with pressure. Whether the pressure is coming big or small, if you're doing something like that, you have a better shot of managing it.

25:44David Novak:Hello, friends. I hope you're loving this conversation. Be sure to stay tuned to the very end of the episode. As always, David and I are going to debrief some of the concepts that he talks about with this week's guest. So stay tuned to the very end, and I will see you soon. And, you know, Ben, you've talked about already the importance of being present, the importance of going out in the woods and being by yourself and having that quiet time. You know, you know, those are almost like, you know, everybody's reading, you know, Be Here Now, Eckhart Tolle stuff, you know, all the spiritual, you know, spiritual learnings that people are going through.

26:25David Novak:How do you think about all that stuff? Well, the way I think about it, I mean, my faith is something I have to lean into because like even right now, I'm in the midst of I like to do fast occasionally to try to deny myself, you know, just simple things so that I can be a little bit more disciplined to start the week. So today, man, I really want to have a snack and I'm not doing it at this very moment. And why am I doing that? It's like the point of doing that is to try to deny the simple things so that I'm challenging myself to grow in ways where my capacity to handle not having food is not very great.

27:07So it only takes a few hours before I'm starting to get a little hangry. Everybody talks about getting hangry. Well, you have to build capacity to deal with that challenge. And so for me, building capacity and expanding my internal state, my ability to handle discomfort, I have to lean into my faith because look, Ben, I don't have enough discipline right now or accountability or pressure coming at me from the outside like I did in baseball. When you have 40 ,000 people watching you every night, you have pretty good accountability on whether or not you're going to stick with your routines. But when nobody's watching you and my kids aren't around, like I can have a snack and nobody's going to say a word about it.

27:53Right. But it's that internal discipline. How do I discipline myself to be a better version of myself? Well, I have to lean into faith in God and recognize like, if I think he really wants me to do this, then I need to stick with it and be accountable, not only to him, but also to myself when I look in the mirror. And I think a lot of times, you know, we might be really hard on ourselves, especially when it impacts other people at work. But then when it comes to like something we want for ourselves, we give up on ourselves easily, right? And that's where I want to be more consistent with the better version of myself, the parts of me that still need to grow, and the part of me that really wants to grow.

28:38It's like I got to put those together. I got to have more integrity to myself for these moments that I want to challenge myself to be better.

28:47David Novak:So I'm going to help you build your capacity, okay? Help me. See these almonds right here? I'm going to eat one right in front of you. I'm going to put some pressure on you, big guy. You know what? I can handle it, but it does sound good right now. Oh, boy. Even just some almonds sound really good. You're talking about a snack made me want one. Isn't that the way out works? Let me give you a trick on if you like soda and you can't drink soda because it's got calories in it. Zevia. Okay. So, Zevia is a stevia. It's a healthy sweetener, no calories, and it eventually starts tasting like soda. OK, you might think differently, but I love it.

29:27And it helps me like get through these fasts where, you know, coffee and Zevia and water. And I'm pretty good. You've started this nonprofit called Champion Forward. Tell us about it. Well, Champion Forward is my effort to go back into the sports world. My experience was that we had access to all the best coaches, all the best training, all the best physical therapy, the best doctors, even mental skills on the field. And one thing that I did see a gap in, I never experienced it, was what I had just mentioned, some emotional intelligence training. It's really checking in emotionally and helping an athlete really manage that side of their game.

30:13When I realized I wanted to take that back into the sports world, I considered, well, do I go back to school? Do I go get my psychology degree and be a sports psychologist? Or do I create a program that gets access to this, to the young athletes, to the parents and the coaches? And I realized the youth sports world really struggles with this emotional side of what's happening. And it's really challenging everything that people are going through with the NIL filtering down to all high school and youth sports. It's really challenging to be a parent, a coach, and even a kid in this day and age to succeed and kind of keep going up the ladder without dealing with emotional challenges.

30:55And a lot of the studies that are coming out are saying that athletes used to be benefited by being an athlete in college. And now it's more difficult to be an athlete in college than it used to be. And the reason is because they're having to make major decisions every year. And so I wanted to help develop something that will give them an added tool to start practicing that you don't have to be a therapist to do. You don't have to go to counseling to do or anything. You can start doing it yourself. And it's simple and it's not therapeutic. We're not trying to be mental health therapists or step in somebody's lane in a place we don't belong.

31:34But it is a program that you can start to have these conversations, not only as a team, but as a parent with your kid in the car ride home, on the dinner table, wherever is appropriate for you. And when we give them these tools and they start doing this, we're seeing benefits. We're seeing their ability to regulate go up without even doing counseling or therapy. And so we do suggest people that are struggling, go do counseling, go do therapy, even preemptively before you're struggling. But if you don't have time to do that and you're not doing that yet, this is another tool for young athletes, parents, and coaches to start putting into their sports ecosystem and really starting to learn some of the cues that I wish I would have known as a young person.

32:19David Novak:Like, what do you wish you would have known? Let's just give us one example you wish you would have known. So what I wish I would have known is prior to doing my competition, if I had had a safe space to say, hey, I'm going to check in from the whole rest of the day, whatever's gone on yesterday, today, up to this point, if I check in and say, well, I'm feeling, we've got a list of 10 emotions, I've got a card down there. And if I say, I'm feeling hurt, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling excited. Just by checking in and saying those things out loud, there's evidence that it takes a little bit of the pressure that you're feeling internally away before you enter the competition.

33:00And so what we say is, in our organization is, if you learn to do feelings well, feel well, then you will do a better job of failing well, which is a really important part of being a young athlete. Failing well is learning how to, you know, fail and turn around and go back and do it again and be okay. If you do feelings well, you're going to fail well. And ultimately, you're going to play free. And that's always the goal. Can we play free? Why? Because a free player is a fast player, David. So if you want to be great, you want to be fast. If you learn to check in and clear the deck a little bit emotionally going in, you're going to be able to make faster decisions and be less emotionally up and down based on what the game throws at you.

33:44I wish I would have known that. That probably would have helped me be even more free. Then afterwards, when you have a bad game, you have a good game, you know exactly what to do. You go back, you go back and you check in again and you clear the deck and you go, hey, now I'm transitioning for being a hero out on the field for my team, I can be a human again because I know that whatever I experienced out there on the field, I'm going to be okay. I evened it back out and I can enter the rest of my world back in a more free way.

34:16David Novak:What do you think well-intentioned parents and coaches are doing that can actually make pressure harder for young athletes? Well, I think they see what a young athlete is capable of and they want to push, right? And they want to push, push, push. And here's the thing. Coaches have a tougher job than parents, even in regard to this, because it is their job to push, but they also have to recognize when they're pushing the player too hard and they have to give them a break or they have to say, hey, this particular player needs some encouragement. They don't need to be pushed right now. They need to be lifted up.

34:51They need to be given a little bit of a break, you know, mentally and emotionally. So they have a really difficult job there to learn when to push and when to pull. And look, they're the best person to understand where the entire team is. They can feel where the whole team is, right? And whether the team needs a push. But a coach needs this because a coach needs to be able to recognize when one particular player, like maybe the whole team needs to be pushed, but that particular player needs a different talking to. And they need to be checked on mentally where they're at, how they're doing. It's great for coaches in regard to that.

35:25For parents, I think parents don't realize how much that they are stepping into a coach's shoes when their job is actually support. So when you're a parent, your job is literally, especially when your kid is playing a sport, to say, hey, I love watching you. This is really enjoyable for me. And what else can I do to help just give you everything you need to go out there and succeed? And so the parents that don't step in the place of a coach, but instead they're in the place of the resource partner for that young athlete. They're in the place of what kind of food do you need to be more dialed in?

36:03What kind of sleep pattern can I help you to be more dialed in? What kind of schedule can I help you with that will help you feel like when you're going out there and playing, you're not feeling the pressure of school and you're feeling the pressure of everything else. And then you as a parent help hold the athlete accountable to what the athlete says they want to be held accountable to, right? And a coach holds the team accountable to what the team says they want to be held accountable to. The problem is oftentimes as a parent or a coach, you're holding an athlete accountable to something or a team accountable to something they've not even agreed to be held accountable to.

36:40And so then they complain and whine and they don't want to be pushed. Well, they never told you what they wanted to be pushed that hard, but you believe they're capable, so you keep pushing them. That's where there has to be an agreement. a great book for any of those coaches, parents that find themselves doing that is the book called 10 to 25. And this book basically says, here's how we can help this particular younger generation right now versus previous ones. They don't listen the same way we did. Right. So we've got to learn to coach them and teach them a little bit different because of the way that they've grown up.

37:18And so, yeah, we as parents and coaches, guess what? We got to check in too. We got to model it. We got to actually challenge ourselves to get better and to grow in the way that we coach and the way that we parent. We never stop growing.

37:32David Novak:How can a leader tell whether they're really helping people, helping their kids or their team handle pressure, or they're actually adding more pressure to the equation? Follow the energy makers, not the energy takers. Okay. And what I mean by that is there are people on your team, there are people in your business, you might be one of them who are energy takers. Okay? Energy takers, they motivate by complaining. They motivate by being negative. They motivate by saying, we got to do better. We're stinking at this and this and that. Okay, look, that's going to take energy from people. Look, there is a time to look at the numbers and go up on the whiteboard and say, hey, guys, we're capable of more than this, okay?

38:20And challenge them for more. But then to do it in a way that is creating energy, building energy. If you follow the energy makers on the team and they are excited, they are motivated, and they have ideas for more, and you have ideas for more, and the energy makers as a whole are making, overtaking the takers, right? That's when you know you're headed in the right direction, I believe. But there were times where I was on a few different teams in the major leagues where, look, Joe is an energy maker. Joe is not a guy that is going to try to take it away from you. He's not going to be negative, right?

39:02But you have to have guys on the team that are going to police things because Joe was never going to be a police type of guy. Well, we had to have guys that were, you know, rah, rah, glue guys, encouraging, building up. You got this man, like encouraging us. If we had a bunch of those guys and then the other guys to be the police guys to challenge guys that are kind of dropping the ball here and there, then that was a great mix. But if we had too many guys that were like, hey, we got to be better. We're not good enough. We're not good enough. We got to be better. And there wasn't enough guys lifting everybody up, then that would, it didn't matter how, how much they wanted it because there was too many energy takers.

39:43So that's what I'm saying. Energy makers, those are the ones you got to pay attention to the energy. Do you have enough of that? And if you got enough of that, then you can let the, you know, the guys at the, at the backside challenge and say, Hey, we got to be better. Come on. You know? And I think from the teams I was on, you had to have a mix of both. You can't just have all these rah, rah people. You got to have some people that are like, Hey, hey, we can do better. So you have to have a mix.

40:08David Novak:I love that. Energy makers, energy takers, love it. I always say that positive energy lifts you up, negative energy brings you down. And that's your... Well, and let's be honest. There are times where you need to have a sober-minded approach, somebody that's going to bring you down to earth because you're up in the clouds and you're like, yeah, we're great. We're going to be so amazing. We got this. Yeah, but you aren't executing. So whenever we had too much of that up in the clouds and you don't have somebody saying, hey, come back to earth, we got to execute this next moment, it would never work out, right?

40:42We'd fall flat eventually. And that was where the balance was off too much in regard to head in the clouds.

40:50David Novak:Well, there's a big difference, don't you think, Ben, between a truth teller, which is what I think you're saying everybody needs to have, okay, and a cynic. Oh, yeah, 100%. So you can, yeah. But if you're a truth teller, it can be easy to turn into a cynic, right? At the wrong time. And I've been that before where I could get down on myself and critical and it's not a good place to be and it doesn't really help anybody, right? So at some level, you got to find the balance there and saying, hey, there is a truth that leads you to what you're capable of and more potential. and there's a truth that is just literally telling you that you're not good right now.

41:34David Novak:You know, this has been a lot of fun. I want to take you back, you know, way back, although you're a very young guy still. What's a story from your childhood that really shaped the kind of leader you are today? Well, one of the stories that I share in the book that I like from my childhood is, is, you know, I had a couple of different coaches that were really important in my life. And Coach Gerdes was my junior high baseball, basketball track coach. He was everything coach for me as a young seventh and eighth grader. And coach kept it fun. He had structure to everything he did, but he always kept it fun, right?

42:16And we didn't realize what he was doing and how he was doing it, but it was the combo of his ability to keep things structured and then also make sure that we succeeded enough to keep it fun, right? And so even scheduling, the way he scheduled the teams we played, if we'd have scheduled a whole bunch of hard teams, it wouldn't have been as fun because we wouldn't have won as much, right? So there's even like a coach really has a chance, a leader has a chance to structure, like basically frame up the season or frame up the goals in a way that either make it like, this is fun because we are succeeding and we're just on the edge of being better versus, man, we stink.

43:02We can't win a game, right? And so Coach Gerdes taught me that. But I think the second thing that I would say about that is Coach Gold, and he's got a great last name, but he was my high school baseball coach. And he was my math teacher. He was our FCA sponsor. So he was a man of God, a young guy at the time. you know, just 10 years older than us in high school, you know, like 25, 26. And I looked up to him and went, man, this guy, he really, really, I just really respected the way he went about things. Well, he was the guy that when I graduated high school, I didn't have any scholarships to go play sports in college.

43:39And he was a guy that said, hey, I think there is more for you potentially. And there's a scout day happening over here and you have to pay$50 of your own money. but here's the thing he had built. I wouldn't have done that scout day, which ultimately landed me a scholarship. I would never have done that scout day if I didn't first have a relationship with him. Like he was what I would call a foggy weather friend in that moment where like when you're a high school kid, what do you know? You don't even know what you don't know. Right. And so I'm like in the fog, don't know what my next move is. And he was saying, hey, I know there's more for you.

44:20Here's an opportunity. I think you should go do this. Maybe give it a shot, right? Just take a risk and go out there and do it. And, you know, he believed in me. He wasn't just, you know, it's one thing for someone that's older than you that, you know, you're getting all these scholarships offers and they want to come after school and say, hey, let me help you, you know, right? Like, Like that's a kid that's a fair weather fan in your life. And it's easy to be that person that sees somebody succeeding and maybe going on to an, and let me help you make the right decision out there because you're really going to do something.

44:56But what about the kid like me who had no opportunities? And he was literally saying, look, this might be a benefit to you and I think you should go do it. So I, after my season, picked up my uniform, went to this scout day, met a guy named Elliot Johnson. another guy that believed in me. And, you know, it's these it's these types of people that I really think, you know, I call it borrowed belief. Sometimes you don't believe in yourself and you need somebody else that believes in you. You need to borrow their belief. And then that gets you that's the bridge for a time to get you to where your confidence grows.

45:34David Novak:You know, you're arguably the greatest utility baseball player to ever, ever play the game. You know, where did you get the this, you know, desire, ability to basically play wherever the team really needed you? You know, I remember, you know, playing a lot of sports, man. I got to be a third baseman. I got to be a shortstop. If I don't get that, you know, if I don't get to play there, I'm going to be pouting for the rest of my life. And where did you learn how to do what the team needs? Well, that that started with my dad, first and foremost. My parents, you know, they are still the, my dad's the pastor of a small church in Eureka where I grew up.

46:13And at that church, you know, there's not that many people, right? And it's a small town. So, you know, many hands make light work, but also there are times in a church where there's not that many hands. And there's a lot of work, a lot more work than there are hands. And so, you know, part of what I learned as a young person is, look, you got to be adaptable and you got to be willing to help wherever help is needed. And so whether I was playing sports or whether I was serving in the church, the goal was to do your best and to step into the role that's needed at the time. And so I remember as a kid, we had a puppet team.

46:51You know, if you'd asked me if I wanted to grow up to be a puppeteer when I was a kid, as an athlete, I would have been like, no, that's not the thing I want to do. But because we had this puppeteer team and, you know, we needed people to do it, like, I learned how to be a puppeteer, right? And so things like that where it's like, man, I did some really interesting things. look when I got to major league baseball and the goal was winning the game so so I wasn't a left fielder does that mean I can't play left field no heck no I'll go out there and take balls in left field I'll tell me where you want me to go I'll give it a shot like if that's what the team needs and for me that was just the obvious thing you do to if you want everybody to win where'd you learn the most about how to win I mean my dad and mom were that was the competitiveness came from them for sure.

47:45There's a competitive streak in our family, but beyond the competition, actually learning the strategic side of winning, I would say there were people I came across. Dan Hefner, who's the head baseball coach at Dallas Baptist University, is a guy I came across that. Dan is one of the best minds I've been around in regards to hitting. Also, John Maley, Derek Shelton, some of my other hitting coaches that I was around, these guys were great strategists and helped me realize like, you know, you can have, you know, only really one thought that you have to stick with. And then you have to switch it.

48:29Sometimes you switch it in the middle of an at-bat. But if you're not prepared with all the other strategies and you know your options, then you're not going to know what to switch it to, right? And so, So, you know, Joe was a genius that I had to not try to figure out how and why he was doing what he was doing because that would have made my head spin.

48:52David Novak:You talk so much about strategy and decision-making. I mean, you know, take us through a typical at-bat. I mean, because that's like I don't think people really think that way when they think about baseball. I mean, I think they think you just go up there, you're looking for the pitch to hit it, you know. But strategy, decision-making, that's a little new terminology for baseball players. Well, when you're, let's just say you're a player and you have a great manager, and you're around that manager a lot, you start to anticipate his moves, right? So you'll see part of the game develop and start to go, oh, I bet Joe is going to probably do this.

49:30So let's say there was men on first and third, and I'm batting right-handed. There's a left-handed pitcher on the mound. Let's say there's one out, okay? I can almost guarantee you early in my career, Joe would have called for what's called a safety squeeze. A safety squeeze. I could have seen the situation, read it, and before I'd looked down at the third base coach, I wouldn't have even had to look. I basically knew he was going to put on a safety squeeze. So what that means is no matter what the pitcher throws, I'm trying to hit a perfect bunt to the right side to make the first baseman field it.

50:06because he's holding the runner on. He's got to go in and field that. That's an easy run at third. And then it gets a runner to second. You're giving yourself up, but you get a run. And now you have another run in scoring position, right? So you're giving up and out, but it's a great RBI sacrifice. And let's say Joe didn't put it on though. And I'm facing this lefty. I know now I've got the right side of the infield open. So if this pitcher on the mound, I've got to pay attention to what kind of a pitcher is he? How is he pitching? Is he going to try to throw me hard in? Is he going to try to sink the ball down and away?

50:44Up and away, what's he going to try to do? Go big hook? He's got all this repertoire. No matter who it is, I've got to make a decision on what he's doing. So let's say it's a guy like Chris Sale, who's a lefty I've faced in my career. He throws upper 90s. Hard fastball, nasty slider. he's going to try to throw me in, up, or his slider down below my barrel. Okay, so what does that mean? If he's going to try to throw it atop of the zone, I need to stay above the ball with my bat. So I'm going in looking for the fastball up over the plate. I don't want to look for it in. I want to look for it out over the plate because then that keeps me on a slider if he starts a slider up in that same location.

51:24And so I got to stay above it so that it's got giddy up on it. So he's trying to get it to the top of zone. It's likely that if you swing at that pitch, you're going to hit a fly ball. Well, I don't want to pop up. A fly ball might be okay, but it's not really what I'm trying to aim to do. So if I want to get a line drive base hit or hit a hard ball through that right side so that I can advance both runners, I got to stay above the ball, let it get a little deep. And if I get that fastball in that location, I'm taking a particular type of swing and hopefully hit a hard line drive through that right side.

51:58and that way I advance the runner from first to second, maybe even third, get the runner in from third base. But if I miss it, it's likely going to be a fly ball and a sack fly anyways, right? If I take that approach. But if I take a different approach and I don't think about all that, I'll just swing and miss or hit a foul ball back at the screen and then he gets me to two strikes, he goes to his nasty slider and I'm struck out. That's next level stuff, I love that.

52:27David Novak:You know, when you think about all the great coaches and players that you've been around, who was the best you've ever been around to handle pressure? Well, Evan Longoria was really good in Tampa Bay. Very good at kind of calming himself and being ready for the moment. And as a young player, he came up and he was nails in that first year, 2008, for us as a rookie and ends up helping us get to the World Series and being one of the best players in the league. So he was phenomenal as a young rookie. watching kind of John Lester. John Lester as a pitcher was phenomenal. Rizzo with two strikes. One of my favorite things to watch was him with two strikes.

53:06These are guys who just are so professional that it didn't matter how it looked. It didn't matter how, you know, they were so locked into what their goal was and how they were focused that it just seemed like whatever happened on the outside didn't matter. They were going to do their thing.

53:23David Novak:You know, Ben, this has been so much fun, and I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions. So are you ready for this? Okay, yeah, let's do it. The three words that best describe you. Serious? Oh, no, let's use the words intense, goofy, and cheap. If you could be one person for a day besides yourself, who would it be? Oh, one person for a day. Right now, I would be Pete Crow Armstrong. He is just on another planet with the way he's swinging the bat. Your biggest pet peeve? Slow traffic. Who would play you in a movie? Dax Shepard. One player that everyone should study as a leader?

54:04David Novak:Jason Hayward. Hardest position you ever had to play? Hardest position. First base. The easiest person to strike out? Well, I only struck one out, so I got to say Yadier Molina. And he struck him out. What's something you've been curious about lately that has absolutely nothing to do with baseball? Putting a pressure washer at my house that I just put together. The mix, the right mix of a pressure washer, soap. The one thing you do just for you. Go to the mountains. Besides your family and friends, what's your most prized possession? My dog, Evie Count. We'll let Evie count. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear?

54:52David Novak:Probably worship music. What's something about you that few people would know? I am more of a creative than people realize. I hear Evie in the background. I love it. You hear it. Yeah, she's barking about something. What's one of your daily rituals, something that you never miss? Coffee in the morning. That's great. We're out of the lightning round. Great job. And I got just a few more questions. I'll let you go here. You know, you've got three young kids. How do you think about leading at home, Ben? I try to lead by example more than I have to talk. And, you know, talking to the kids and saying the right things is hard, is difficult.

55:35But I'm trying to be an example in the way that I go about, like, what I'm doing. Not just what I'm saying, but what I'm doing.

55:42David Novak:What's something that your kids have taught you that baseball never could? It is, parenting is, you have to have a lot of grace for yourself, far more than in sports. When you look at your life and where you want to go, what do you see as your unfinished business? Probably developing my farm. Last question. What's one piece of advice you'd want to give to anyone who wants to be a better leader? my one my one piece of advice for anybody that wants to be a better leader is you need to pay more attention to your emotional state on a regular basis well i think if they read your book they'll probably get some good tips on how to do that and uh ben it's been awesome it really has you're a hell of a hell of a good guy yeah thanks david i'm glad you're giving back to people in such a powerful way and keep up the great work.

56:41David Novak:Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for interviewing me. Appreciate that.

56:50David Novak:David, I feel pretty ready to be in pressure packed moments after that conversation with Ben Zobris. You're very good at handling pressure, Kula. I hope I don't put too much on you. Well, you're David Novak, so you love to put pressure on on everybody. But I think I've learned a lot of that from you. And of course, I learned a lot about how to handle pressure and sort of the emotional capacity you have to build up in order to really perform at your best when all the spotlights are on you. And David, like we do at the end of every episode, I want to debrief some of these main sort of takeaways that I pulled from this conversation with Ben.

57:28David Novak:I mean, there are so much in here. And when we went into this conversation, I was just expecting great stories about baseball. But Ben is such an interesting thinker. I mean, the way that he thinks about preparing for these spotlight moments and everything that you have to do physically, emotionally, mentally to get ready. It was so fascinating. And I really love David when he talked about how he actually prepares for those spotlight moments. And he really talks about how you have to do it before that spotlight moment arrives. Talk a little bit about his take on that and what business leaders can learn from it.

58:04David Novak:Yeah, I think what he really described is what I think every great business leader does in their business, which is they put process and discipline around what really matters. And so Ben was very focused on watching film, you know, thinking through the strategies and decisions that you might make behind every at bat. He gave a lot of credit to his coaches that helped him, you know, get prepared to really, you know, make each at bat be the best it could possibly be. And, you know, I don't know about you, but I loved it when he described what it was like when he had an at bat in the major leagues.

58:43David Novak:You know, just the detail that he talked about, you know, what if the pitch is coming high or there's a slider and, you know, different ways that he could approach the bat. But he really talked about strategy and making decisions. But, you know, this guy really, really knows his job. And by doing all the hard work, you know, putting all that hard practice in, when you get there and you have that moment where you need to perform, your odds of performing are going to be so much better than if you just show up. And I think that's true in baseball. I think that's true in business. He also talked about doing that really detailed work in the shadows when no one is watching.

59:29David Novak:And I just think that that's such a great takeaway for leaders everywhere, because you have to do the work when no one's watching or else you're not going to ever perform when the pressure is on. Yeah, that's right. It's like all the reading that you might do as a leader, all the homework that you do on particular situations, all the work you do looking at what other business leaders are doing and saying, how could I do this in my business? The pattern thinking that that brings you, you know, it's that extra effort that you put into making sure that you're getting all the know-how you can possibly get to help you make the best possible decisions and grow yourself and your business.

1:00:08David Novak:that's what makes a real special leader. David, another thing that Ben said that I'll be thinking about for a long time is this idea of energy makers and energy takers and how every team really needs a balance of both of those types of people. Talk a little bit more about that and how leaders can apply that same concept to their team dynamics. I love that too, energy makers, energy takers. And what I really like is this approach about the importance to have the right kind of balance. You know, you want all the positive energy that that energy makers can bring. You know, I always say positive energy lifts you up.

1:00:43David Novak:Negative energy brings you down. You need those people. And when you're positive and your mood elevator is really high, that's when you make your best decisions. That's when you perform at the highest level. But he also talked about how you need people on the team who are really truth tellers, you know, because if you have everybody just feeling so positive and, you know, this way and that way and, you know, everything's perfect, et cetera. You got your head in the clouds and you're not grounded. So you need to have somebody bring you back to earth, but not take away all that energy that's going to get you to perform at the highest level.

1:01:16David Novak:And that's why, you know, having the balance between these energy makers and then truth tellers is great. And he said, if you had a team just full of energy takers, all the people that would talk about everything that could potentially go wrong, man, that's a formula for disaster. But, you know, that's why he said you need the balance of both. Because if you have all energy makers, that could be a disaster too. It's finding that right balance that makes you whole-brained, basically. You know, that brings it all together and makes the team perform at the best level. I do think it was really important when you both talked about the distinction between an energy taker and a cynic.

1:01:57David Novak:Because it's a fine line, but an energy taker is not a cynic. No, an energy taker, you know, is a realist. Okay. That brings up, you know, the challenges that you have, as I understand the way his definition is, whereas a cynic, it just thinks every everything sucks. Okay. And, you know, nothing's going to work. And, you know, it's, you know, you kind of want those Eeyores that always think it's going to rain, you know, to go somewhere else. Okay. and make somebody else's business miserable, okay? Or somebody else's team miserable. But, you know, I think the biggest thing he's talking about, though, is just the importance to have balance, you know, balance in your team so that you can perform at the highest level.

1:02:45David Novak:David, I also loved learning about his foundation, Champion Forward. And when you were asking him about how parents and coaches can do the best they can to help their kids and their players succeed, I loved his process for driving accountability and the parent to athlete or coach to young athlete relationship. Can you break that down a little bit for us and talk about what you would take from that and apply it to a business or a team? Well, I think number one, he's saying, you know, you got to create a goal and there needs to be buy-in for that goal with the individual and the team. So, you know, start out with agreeing on what that goal really is and get the buy-in for the goal.

1:03:30David Novak:Okay. When you have that, everybody knows this is where we're headed. And, you know, then what I think as a leader you do is you basically say, what is it going to take for us to be successful? How do we reach that goal? And, you know, I think one of the things that leaders can do is remove the barriers that are out there. You know, our best franchisees, when I was at Yum Brands, you know, they knew how to drive accountability. They would buy a store, for example, take that store over, and they'd go and talk to the team and say, okay, you know, what do you think we're capable of doing here? They would get by it.

1:04:06David Novak:Okay? Everybody agree this is possible. And then that franchisee would take all the excuses away by basically saying, is there anything I can do to help you get that done? What needs to be done? Somebody said, well, I need a new fryer or I need to have more hours for labor or whatever. And then the franchisee would remove those barriers and, you know, get alignment on what they could do, what they couldn't do, but would try to just free that person up so that they could perform the best by making sure they had all the equipment that they needed, had everything they needed to do to hire great people, etc.

1:04:46David Novak:etc. And then he could hold people accountable because he took all the excuses away. And, you know, also at the same time is in the same boat with everybody saying that you asked for it, you got it. Now let's go. How often should a leader address the fact that they have removed the barriers and obstacles to someone's success? What I think a leader has to do, Kula, is hold people accountable. If you do remove the barriers and you do give people what they need to be successful, and everybody is in agreement that they have what they need to be successful, the minute the excuses start coming forward, you'd say, hey, hold on a second.

1:05:27David Novak:I've given you everything you asked for. You said, if we did this, okay, you would do X. So it's time to do X. But I think, you know, if you don't give people what they need to succeed, if you don't remove the barriers. It's hard to hold people accountable with real legitimacy. This gives you the ability to hold people accountable with power, the right kind of power, the power of positivity, and we can make this happen. Well, David, as we wrap this episode today, what are some of the things that you want everybody listening to walk away really thinking about? Number one, the way how to handle pressure is to do the preparation it takes to perform.

1:06:08David Novak:And then when you're putting those pressure positions, you'll be able to do it. Number two, there's energy makers and energy takers on teams. You need the right combination of both to have the best possible team. And if one overwhelms the other, then you're going to have an issue. But as a leader, you got to find the right balance on your team so that you have those energy makers and you have the truth tellers. And number three, you know, the best way to drive accountability is to really get a great goal, get buy-in for that goal, and then remove the barriers and obstacles that are in the way so that people know that you're on their team, you're on their side, and that you're going to help them get done what they'd like to get done.

1:06:57David Novak:And I thought Ben was a terrific, a terrific leader who's really thought about these things. And I think there's so much power that can be learned by reading his book. Absolutely, David. Well, thank you for another excellent episode of How Leaders Lead. Thanks, Ben Zobrist, for being on the show and sharing your insights with our leaders. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in to How Leaders Lead. We will see you next week.

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