Tools to Perform Under Pressure with Mental Performance Coach Greg Poss

0:10Welcome to Revenue Builders hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. Greg Poss spent decades playing and coaching professional hockey across North America and Europe, including the Mannheim Eagles to a championship and coaching the German national team. He now applies that experience as a mental performance coach, helping athletes, coaches, and leaders build stronger responses under pressure. In this minisode, Greg explains how to recognize when anxiety, frustration, or anger has taken over, how breath awareness can help you regain focus, and why the moment you start blaming the coach, the customer, or the circumstances, you have already given up control of the next move.

0:46Let's dive in. so i think that when you find yourself being reckless um you can that's a trigger for yourself because we're kind of bordering on this how do you know when you're not how do you know when you're in lower higher brain i think we identify a few things here number one is if you're thinking and you've got the capacity to ask yourself if i'm in higher brain or lower brain and you can think that you've got a good chance of getting to the higher brain if you're breathing if you're cognizant of your breathing you are probably on your way or in the higher brain but if you're not aware at all of your breath and by the way that's why God designed us that way he wanted the breath to be in the lower brain he doesn't want us to think about having to take a breath and there's a lot of things like that in life however those same things that were designed for us to keep us alive we're able to check them in our higher brain?

1:46Like, how am I breathing? Am I breathing deeply or am I breathing shallowly? And Greg, you probably have these things of like, let's just kind of put a pin on this one. Let's nail these on your research. How do we know when we're in one or the other, and then some things that we can do to pull ourselves up and out? Yeah, well, a real simple way is to recognize what state we're in. Like I said before, If we're an angry, anxious, frustrated, any of those negative emotions, we're in our lower brain. If we recognize that we're peaceful, that we're focused, that we're aware, that we're joyful, that means we're in our higher brain.

2:32And when we talk about breathing, why does any kind of breathing technique is good. there's a reason why in martial arts for the last you know 10 000 years or whatever uh they focus a lot on breath because when you're in a martial arts or an mma that's a very fearful situation when we learn the ability to slow our breath down it sends the safe signal to our brain everything's okay out there if we're breathing shallow all of a sudden our brain's like oh man this must be a dangerous situation it becomes fearful and that's why breathing is so powerful i i with with my clients we just do a very very simple four seven eight breathing technique uh breathe in for four hold for seven breathe out for eight um and it's amazing um if you have a big putt a three-footer and your buddy tells you i'll give you 20 bucks if you make it if you just step back and and do a couple rounds of four seven eight breathing it's amazing how calm and focused you get and how dialed in you get because you feel you feel safe you're fearless you're not fearful um so and there's a number of good wim hoff has a bunch of great breathing techniques yeah he really does yeah yeah i mean i do those every morning um just to get me into that state before i even get out of bed uh but it's um there are so many simple things we can do to first off recognize that we're lower or higher brain and tools to get out of our lower brain, prevent our lower brain from getting triggered and accelerate into our higher brain.

4:17There's a lot of science behind this, but I tell people all the time, it's like to be a great race car driver, all you need to know is the steering wheel, the gas pedal and the brake. And you can be a great race car driver. You don't need to know all the science and what's under the hood and how the engine works. You know, a Formula One team has 20 people working on that, engineers. But if you want to know it, I can tell you, not a problem. But in reality, you don't even need to know that. You just need to know the tools, the recognition, and use them. That's it. It's a very simple process. Remind us of the book again.

4:58Great. Yeah, at this time, the book is in rewrite. So amazing working on that. But what I did come up with is a about nine months ago was a 21 day program because I'm looking for ways to scale it to help more people. And obviously doing group calls and individual calls takes a lot of time and effort. So I want to come up with a program that the people can basically do on their own. So it came up with a 21 day program. It takes 21 days to build a habit. It takes about 10 minutes a day. I've had over 250 people go through it. Everyone who completed it, and it was probably about a 95 % completion rate, which if anybody knows anything about online programs, that's really, really high.

5:43To be fair, I tell them, if you're doing this program, I'm going to make damn sure you finish it. I'll call them. I'll text them. I make sure they finish it because it's important for me that they have a transformation. But all the people who have completed it have had an unbelievably positive transformation. And it doesn't take a lot of time. And you can do it in 21 days. And of course, there's things you can do after that. But if you do just that, you are doing so much for becoming higher brain dominant. You learn all the tools in those days. You learn how to apply them. And you get daily feedback from me.

6:20Because every night you've got to submit your daily brain submission. And I go through every one of those submissions and give feedback on it through text, email. Amazing. How do we do that? How do we get to that? Is it on a website? How do they find it? Yeah, it's on a website. I'll send you the sales link. You can put it in the comments. And they can sign up whenever they're ready to go. It's 21 days, basically, with your guidance for 21 days. Yes. You watch a two or three-minute video in the morning. You do the exercises during the day. Amazing. You fill out the daily brain. It's the best way I've come up with to get people on this, fast track them.

7:04Because if you're working with a high-level athlete or a high performer, they don't have a lot of time. And their attention is being grabbed. They need something they can do simply, quickly, and have transformational results. And that's been this program. But I'll send you the webpage for it. And you can put it in the description. Put it in the show notes for sure. So like, and I'm thinking, would you not just do that for individuals? Would you do it for like, you know, executive teams? And would you do it for groups of companies and that kind of perfect? Yeah, I've got, I've got, I've got two division one hockey teams doing the program over the summer, which is unbelievably smart because now when the season starts, they start probably in October.

7:53Everyone's on the same wavelength. Everyone's speaking the same higher brain and lower brain language. And what I tell the coaches is it makes your players so much more malleable for you. They're so much more resilient. You can, to John's point, you can push them harder because you know they can handle it. They've got the mental skills to handle it. So you can actually train them at a much higher level. So I've got two Division I hockey teams. I've got several coaches. I've got an NHL coach who's doing it with his staff. and if that resonates with them, they want to go on with their whole team.

8:26We're going to get you out to corporate America, buddy, because Johnny and I have got a huge passion around this. I joke that when I was younger in high school, I had a better lower brain than anybody on the field. No, I'm serious. I'm serious. And I could get away with living in my lower brain. and here's what I mean by that is that when I got to college, I was immediately placed into the thinking brain, to the higher brain. And I struggled at first because everybody could compete the same way I could in the lower brain. And most of them were as strong as I was, was big as I was, was as fast as I was, if not faster.

9:14But the higher up I went in competition, I realized that, you know, when I looked and opened up my eyes in college, the game was so fast. And I could tell that my thinking brain, it was good news because my brain was trying to slow it down. And that was a good sense for me. It's like over the years, I've kind of realized that when I look up and if things are slow around me, if I'm in a meeting and I see the economic buyer, I can see their disposition. I can hear the, I can watch the body language. I know where the objection is. I know that I'm in my higher brain, but if I am, and if I am, and by the way, I think people are wired a certain way because I think people with lower brains have real high creativity because their brain just runs unabated.

10:04And you can come up with a lot of great ideas. This is what I've learned about myself. But if you don't have, I call them the C's. If you don't have curiosity, if you don't have the ability to engage curiosity and compassion, and I'm talking about like compassion for yourself, like, holy smokes, I'm at Boise State and these dudes are fast and these dudes are strong and I don't understand what's going on here. But I could have compassion for myself and say, okay, dude, we're in a different ballgame here. If I couldn't engage compassion, I stayed in a lower brain. And then I moved into some things I want to talk about a little bit here on, you know, Blaine.

10:47Well, I had a bad high school coach. They didn't teach me technique. I don't have the right shoes or the right equipment because I'm a freshman. Could you just comment on that a little bit? I find a trigger to know if you're in a lower brain is the excuse department. Could you tell us what that is? Yes, we call that victim mode. Yeah, talk about it. Yeah, anytime we're in victim mode, we're in an extreme lower brain state because what the lower brain is doing is it doesn't want to say, oh, I failed. They're so afraid of failure that I got to blame something else. You know, the coach didn't put me in the right role.

11:26I didn't get the breaks. You know, this player had better training than me growing up. It's my parents' fault. All those victim mode thoughts. And if we're in victim mode, that means we are in extremely lower brain state. And we got to get out of there as quickly as possible because we're vibrating at a such lower energy level. We'll never be that successful in victim mode. but again it's our lower brain trying to avoid the pain and blame somebody else if we're in a higher brain state we're taking responsibility and okay we're not happy if something doesn't go our way we don't blow it off oh no big deal i lost no we're pissed but at the same token we're like okay what do i need to change in my execution to be more successful next time what did i learn from this situation because damn it this ain't going to happen again i'm going to figure this I'm going to figure this out now.

12:22Like if you went in that state now, from every situation you're learning and growing, you're taking responsibility. Even if something happened that wasn't directly under your responsibility, you're going to think about ways that you can tweak it. So you have more control, more responsibility over that situation in the future, you know, and you know, who knows what the solution is, but we're going to find it. We're not going to, and we're not going to stop until we find it. And that's fun. That's being a master of your craft. That's exhilarating. And again, we always have access to that. No one can ever take it away from us.

13:00We can live in that state day to day to day until the day we die. And that is what we're going for.

13:10Greg Poss: Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe. Rate and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management. where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.