Training for Pressure with Greg Poss

0:00As a professional hockey coach, I always thought if I could win a championship, that would be the ultimate. Well, in 2007, with the Mannheim Eagles, we won the championship. About 15 minutes after we raised the trophy, the fear already started setting in. It started fading so quickly, I couldn't believe it. By 1 o 'clock in the morning, I was at the McDonald's drive-thru, and I was like, what the hell? This was this big thing I was waiting for all my life. sure it was fun, but that was because I put my belief and that was going to be the thing that was going to make me super happy. And it did, but it fades.

0:37Welcome to the Revenue Builders

0:39John Kaplan: Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives. Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and force management co-founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that, and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid.

1:04Welcome back to the Revenue Builders podcast. Today we're diving deep into the ultimate differentiator in elite performance, which is the mental game. In high-stake enterprise sales, just like in professional sports, talent alone is not enough. It's about resilience, managing pressure, and maintaining an elite mindset when the stakes are high and the room is tough. Joining us today is someone who has mastered this at the highest levels. Greg Poss spent decades coaching professional hockey across the United States and Europe, including leading the ECHL Everblades to the Kelly Cup championship and the German national team to a championship.

1:48Today, he has translated that high-pressure leadership experience into a career as an elite mental strength coach, helping individuals and teams unlock peak performance by mastering their mindset. I think you'll enjoy this podcast. Welcome, Greg. Hey, Greg. So welcome back. Last time we had you on the podcast, we focused on the mindset and what it takes to consistently perform at an elite level. For instance, we talked about, this is very memorable, we talked about the higher brain and the lower brain. And we discussed how people need to tap into the higher brain. And you said, you know, there's a constant battle between the lower brain, and if I remember right, that's the amygdala, the fear center, and the higher brain, which functions on logic, flow, and creativity.

2:42So give us a little overview again, again, about the higher brain and the lower brain and why we need to tap into the higher brain. Yeah.

2:50John Kaplan: Well, you just correct him on the amygdala for me, please. Cause I can't, I can't let that one go. What did I say? I don't know what you said. Amygdala. You said a magdala. Go ahead, Greg. You knew what I was talking about. Yeah, he did. All right. Yeah. Well, the deal is that we're programmed to have a lower brain. It's an excellent survival mechanism. It kept us living and propagating the species and getting us to this point. But we don't need to survive anymore. We need to thrive. So you can be somewhat successful in the lower brain if you're really, really talented and you're a little bit lucky.

3:32but you're leaving a lot of happiness and success on the table by trying to go about it that way. I mean, we see examples all the time of people that are extremely successful, but are they happy? Not always. And that's because they're going about things in a lower brain way, and it's just not very efficient. And then so the lower brain, if I remember right, is also like fight or flight, right? It kind of tells us little stories about why we should be scared of things. Yeah. In short, the lower brain is our fearful brain, and our higher brain is our fearless brain. Being fearful helped us survive.

4:11If we saw a bear in the woods, we'd either fight or flight, climb a tree or run away or fight the bear to survive. But that whole system was designed to be used very, very seldom. Now, with all the information that we're getting in, and the way society is, we're getting triggered into fight or flight mode on a daily basis, multiple times. And what happens when we do that, we release cortisol into the body. And cortisol is very damaging. If you look at the word disease, if you break it down in Latin, it means dis-ease. So if we're releasing cortisol into our body and having a lot of dis-ease, just trying to survive, we're actually making ourselves physically and mentally not well.

5:01And again, we can cope and get by and find ways, but it's much more efficient to learn how to get into the higher brain state and actually train our brain. So that becomes our automatic response system, a fearless way of living and performing. And it'll definitely optimize our performance. So are you saying that we actually can rewire our brain to be like higher brain dominant and stay away from the lower brain? Absolutely. We will still get lower brain triggered on a daily basis, but it'll happen far less. And then when it does happen, we'll get out of there much quicker. But through neuroplasticity, we now know that we can rewire our brain and we can do that till the day that we die.

5:51Our brain cells never stop growing. There was a famous nuns study in France where they took a thousand nuns and they, you can look it up on, you can Google it, and they studied their brains after they died. And they found out that over 85 % of the nuns had advanced Alzheimer plaques in their brain. But because a nun lives a very higher brain, fearless life, very loving, very purposeful, almost none of those nuns experienced Alzheimer's. The neural networks grew around those plaques, and they were able to be cognitive, very efficient until the day that they died. so yes we can grow our brain just like a muscle and we can actually make our higher brain larger and we can shrink which is our fearless brain and we can shrink our lower brain which which is our fearful brain again when we go through that process i'll go into it later on how exactly to do that we can actually automate that process of going into a higher brain state rather than a lower brain state.

7:05Is there a way for me to tell whether or not, like right now, if I'm in higher brain or lower brain? Like I said, I'm going moment to moment throughout my life or throughout my day. Is there a way for me to tell?

7:18John Kaplan: Your buddy can tell you. I spent enough time with you. I can tell you exactly where you're going. I know, especially when you're giving me shit about amygdala.

7:30No, but is there a way for me to tell Or are you saying that then there's certain triggers that happen and then that's what causes me to go into either higher or lower brain? No, there's a way to tell. Anytime we feel frustrated, anytime we feel angry, anytime we feel any of those negative emotions, that means we are in a lower brain state. And then it would behoove us to get out of there as quickly as possible or use tools. And that's what I teach. I teach a system and structure where people actually learn tools to not go into that state under pressure situations. A great example is the Navy SEALs.

8:10When a Navy SEAL is in a life or death situation, and they've measured this multiple times, their heart rate actually sinks. They don't get fearful. they get even more fearless because they know that's going to be that's going to optimize their performance and give them the best chance of completing the mission now they go through the the navy seals buds training and it's it's so hard that only the best of the best that are oftentimes intuitively higher brain even get through the people that get through the navy seals buds training. They're not the strongest guys. They're not the athletes. They're the guys who have it mentally together.

8:53And when things really, really get hard, they have the ability to help the person next to them. And they're focusing on that instead of themselves, which naturally puts them into a higher brain state and helps them get through such a difficult training. So they weed those people out, only take the cream of the crop. So they have that ability to become fearless, even in a life or death situation.

9:17John Kaplan: I think we've talked about this before, all joking aside, Johnny, I know you've had a ton of concussions. I played a sport that was basically, I don't know what the heck you'd call it today, 40 mile an hour car crash every time, every play. But I'm fascinated by this topic. And I just wanted to encourage the listeners a little bit onto something that you said, Greg. I had forgotten about that nun study. And I've been studying a lot right now so i'm 63 years old and you know i'm worried about cte and and some of the things from football and however the studies and i uh i saw dr peter tia just had a podcast yesterday or the day before and i wish we'll put it in the show notes but there was a neurologist and greg what she said was exactly what you said it does you know everybody's out there doing the blood tests, getting APOE and getting all the, oh, I got these markers and that markers and what have you.

10:18And first of all, dementia and Alzheimer's, like it's a huge, it's almost a bigger spectrum

10:26John Kaplan: now than autism. So what they're finding is just like you said, you could have all those markers. They did a study where they had two brothers, two exactly identical brothers, both had the same plaque. Both had the same. One had Alzheimer's and dementia and the other one did not. And what they found was the disposition of one of the brothers was different. Yeah. And the way that person kind of went through life and handled life, the amazing thing is that I think God is so amazing that he gave us the tools to be able to, no matter where you are, there you go. Yeah. You've got the ability to change anything.

11:12John Kaplan: I don't care if you have all the markers, if you have all the stroke characteristics, if you have all the things that Greg's about to share with us in this podcast. You can do not only to benefit your performance, but your longevity and your quality of life. Yes, because our body's designed to heal itself. And when we go get all those tests, I'm not saying we shouldn't do it. I don't do it. But it actually creates more fear. then all of a sudden, oh my God, I got the markers. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, and it's, I really believe that concussions and, you know, I played professional hockey and, you know, back when I played, if you got hit in the head or took a punch and you got a little woozy, you got your bell rung.

12:00And the next shift, you were back out there. You didn't miss anything. But, you know, I think if we can go about things in a higher brain way, and like you said, have that higher brain disposition, I believe our brain can heal itself. It can rewire itself around any trauma. There was another study of a three-year-old girl who had severe brain damage, I think it was through an accident, and they removed half her brain. But she lived a totally normal life because the other half of her brain rewired everything. I might not have the facts straight. I do have it in my notes, but it's documented that she lived a normal life because her brain rewired around that.

12:45If somebody would have told her it's not going to work, probably wouldn't have worked if we got into a fearful state. But our body and our brain is amazing. It's the same in sports. I work with athletes all the time that are unbelievably be talented and skilled, but they have difficulty playing under pressure. And the solution isn't to do more. It's to get the hell out of the way and let our brain and body do what it already knows what to do. And we'll be fine.

13:20John Kaplan: So good. Johnny knows this. We share a lot of our personal stuff in our life. Sometimes it pops up on the podcast. One time I was struggling really, really bad, and I was with a doctor, and I was all worried about cognitive and was worried about CTE. And I'll never forget this. A guy named Dr. Silverman in Charlotte looked at me and he said, John, I worry less about CTE for you and more about anxiety. And I said, what the hell does that mean? And he said, and they just started sharing with me the science. It's, you know, the more you have yourself in that kind of agitated, anxious state, which is controllable, although I didn't have the tools at the time to do it.

14:08John Kaplan: Once I learned the tools, he actually told me medically he worried more about people with anxiety than people that had smashed their head up against the wall. And that has stuck with me for quite a long time. What a great factor. You know, instead of prescribing medication or he went right to the cause of things. And if we're anxious, we are in extremely lower brain state. And when you get stuck there, like Johnny has seen me, I got stuck in a lower brain state for a while. It's brutal. I mean, and God designed us pretty wildly. Like, you know, it's there for a reason, but he also gave us the higher brain, the, you know, the prefrontal cortex to think.

14:53John Kaplan: But because he didn't want us making a decision whether or not to go pick a piece of fruit where that tiger was, he designed the higher brain to shut off at the command of the lower brain because he didn't want you thinking about the risk of picking that fruit where the tiger was. and you know once you learn that it's like okay you've got the ability to he gave us the ability to assess the situation as the prefrontal cortex got bigger and bigger so I'm really excited about this conversation sorry about the personal stuff but um I uh I love this and for our listeners you don't need you know I'm not saying you don't need doctors you don't need you know we got everything we need right in our hands to do most of what we need to do.

15:41John Kaplan: And that's, I'm so happy to have you on again, Greg. So Johnny, you want to talk a little bit about one of the things that Greg said was the joy of the journey. And it's hard when you're in the struggle, it's hard to actually have perspective because perspective isn't in the lower brain. Perspective's in the higher brain. And I've heard you say that long-term success can't rely on external gratification. And you talked about a little bit earlier about the joy. And can you talk a little bit about how, what you mean there and then how to, how to summon it in the process? How do we get ourselves there?

16:24Well, if you think about it, external gratification, you know, having a nice house, having a nice car, going on a nice vacation, all those things are great and we should go for them. We should enjoy them. We shouldn't say we shouldn't have those things. Of course we want those things. But we shouldn't have the notion that that's going to make us sustainably happy, successful, and fulfilled. It won't. It'll be temporary, but it will not be sustainable. And, you know, as a professional hockey coach, I always thought if I could win a championship, that would be the ultimate. Well, in 2007, with the Mannheim Eagles, we won the championship.

17:02about 15 minutes after we raised the trophy the fear already started setting in it started fading so quickly i couldn't believe it by one o 'clock in the morning i was at the mcdonald's drive-thru and i was like what the hell this was this big thing i was waiting for all my life sure it was fun but that was because i put my my belief and that was going to be the thing that was going to make me super happy and it did um but it fades and then came the fear how am i going to repeat this and i push the guys hard uh what's going to happen in the new season all those anxiety and lower brain thoughts started coming in and that was the night where i decided okay i'm going to start doing things differently i'm going to start studying this stuff i'm going to dive into it i want to develop a program to train the brain just like we train our body i know when i go in the gym what i need to do to make my muscles stronger we need a program that we know what to do with the system of structure to make our brains stronger because I did not want to experience that again.

18:02I should have enjoyed that moment much, much more, but I was, again, too attached to the external gratification. And when we talk about the joy of the journey, you know, that's the internal gratification that we always have access to, and nobody can ever take that away from us. And if we're just enjoying the moment to moment joy of optimizing our process and executing and worrying on that and not thinking about the results, of course, we want results. That's why we do this. But we're much more apt to get those results when we are where our feet are. And we're just in love with our journey and what we're doing.

18:44Then the results just come naturally. And the great thing is when we get the results, we enjoy them a lot more. We enjoy that new car a lot more. We enjoy that nice house a lot more because we don't have a fear of losing because we've got far better, which is internal gratification. I love this part of your thinking because I've heard for years, like I would have people tell me, like, you know, embrace the suck.

19:12John Kaplan: And I didn't really understand what that meant. And today I understand what it means is that the process is really life. The rewards and the anxieties, those are kind of the symptoms of life, but the life is in the process. And I've thought about this even with myself where I said, if I can just get this, then I'll do that. If I can just do this, then I'll do that. And so many, myself and my friends, we're kind of tolerating the process, which is life. We're tolerating it, that time, in the hopes of something else will come. And what's amazing to me when I really think about what you're saying here is that if you're not in a process, fundamentally, Finally, if you're not in a process that you can find a way to love and that gives you energy, no outcome is ever going to make up for that.

20:15John Kaplan: Does that make sense, Greg? Yes, because you're trying to, your thought is you're going to get this external gratification and that's going to be the big thing. So you embrace the suck to get that, but you're missing out on the joy of life. I think a great term is you want to be a master of your craft. and your craft could be anything it could be an elf game it could be your relationships it could be your work um but you want to be a master of your craft and have the joy of that and that will paradoxically give you the best result and when you say that you need to embrace the suck like i i get that what if we're trying to be great at something uh there's always going to be some mundane tasks that we have to do to be really good at it for example to be a great hockey player to be a great soccer player to be a great biker like mac is uh you've got to have an extremely high level of cardio the players like doing the cardio and sitting on a bike for 45 minutes to 60 minutes after practice uh not necessarily that that's the thing that hockey players just don't like working on cardio but the point is if you want to be a great hockey player that's one little part You're going to have to embrace that suck.

21:30All right. But there are so many other things that you that you can do that you get joy from it, that it's not a big deal. And we can learn to gamify things. When I was coaching the Red Bull Salzburg team in Austria, we had was a high level fitness coaches that they really focus on fitness. so every player had to have a certain cardio level and the the players especially the import players the north american players did not enjoy doing that at all but it was part of the program when i came in as a coach this is our fitness coach this is our program we're doing it and you're going to coach the team um and but so but what the players started doing to gamify it they started watching uh the old netflix series breaking bad while they were doing their cardio right or and so it got to a point where they couldn't wait to get off the ice get on the bike and watch breaking bad the next episode and uh so even if that part we went to embrace the suck there's ways to gamify it where it doesn't suck that much we can actually find ways to make it

22:36John Kaplan: fun and enjoyable even the sucky part but what you did as a coach there i think is you connected this is really important, I think, for leaders listening to this. The suck can't be worthless. The suck has to mean something. We all have suck, but if the suck is connected to joy, if the suck is connected to an outcome, if the suck is connected to something greater than us, like a team championship, I think that's what some of the greatest coaches understand, is they help them stand in the moment of time, and they remind them, they get them emotionally connected to the hard things to lead the championships.

23:18John Kaplan: And I think that's one of the fundamental things that a leader has to do. And how do coaches do that? I work with a lot of coaches. I actually have one client who's a coach in the English Premier League. You know, that's high pressure, high stakes soccer. And all the coaches ask the same thing. What do I have to do to motivate my players? What do I have to do to get them into a higher brain state? And the answer is surprisingly simple. You have to role model being higher brain. The players don't necessarily hear what you say. They feel what you say. So you can have the best pregame speech. You could have the best motivational speech.

24:02But if you're in a lower brain state, it is not going to resonate with the players at all. If you're fearful, if you're anxious, if you're afraid you might lose the game, if you're afraid you might get fired, it's not going to. But if you're in a higher brain state, you can actually give a motivational speech that isn't that good. And the players love it because they feel your energy. It's like a dog. If I'm afraid of a dog and I see a big German shepherd, he's going to growl at me. But if I love dogs and I see that German shepherd and I want to I want to pet him and I can't wait to see this beautiful dog.

24:33he's going to start wagging his tail because they smell the fear and likewise they smell the fearlessness it's no difference between a player coach relationship and and the great coaches have have mastered that at a very high level phil jackson um you know officers a number of great coaches but but they they're in a higher brain state which naturally puts everyone around them into that state it's about vibration go a little bit a little bit deeper dive it's about vibrational energy that's if we're vibrating at a high energy level people know it we've all been in that room where one person walks in doesn't say a word and everyone looks and oh that person's powerful without even saying a word you know because it's it's their vibrational energy so

25:25John Kaplan: let's talk about the negative of that. The vibration could be a negative vibration. And again, probably getting too personal here, but my mother, God rest her soul. When I was in low brain state and I had some childhood trauma, so my mom knew exactly what was going on for me and she was a therapist. So she knew exactly, but my mother would get ill around me. And I've never really forgotten that, like the impact of your energy. And I finally figured it out. We, you know, we had a chance to talk about it before she passed away is that my negative, it wasn't like negative energy. I wasn't being negative.

26:07John Kaplan: My anxiety and intensity and my low brain was so high and off the charts that it actually entered others. And I thought about it. It's like, that's happened to me in my leadership style is that, you know, if I'm operating in a low brain state, I actually am going to impact negatively and drive other people into a low brain state around me. And Johnny, I'm going to tip my hat to you here. Orbital sciences though, right? Well, I was going to tip my hat to you here and not talk about my issues any longer, but orbital sciences would be a funny podcast. But when I think about what you did so well, is that you never really added to people's lower brain state.

26:51John Kaplan: Like we didn't know any of this lower brain, higher brain back in the day, but I think you were always encouraging us to step out of where we were and to be able to get perspective. What do you think that was for you? Because PTC, buddy, there was a lot of lower brain activity. Yeah. I think it goes back to something that we'll probably talk about in the latter part of this podcast, but get comfortable being uncomfortable. You know, you have to just, that's part of what you always say is learning the learning is in the struggle and you if you really believe that you have to throw yourself into spaces where you know it's outside your comfort zone and you just have to like embrace what's going to happen to you and learn from it and then you'll be a better person you'll have better character you'll you know but the way you You did that with us, Johnny.

27:49You made us use our higher brain, jump into uncomfortable situations, so therefore we could almost be in it as we understood what we were in

28:01John Kaplan: while we were in it versus just being, and Greg, this is where we need you on the science part of it, just reacting to it. So if you can think about where you are, you're probably, if you can think about what you're in, you're probably in higher brain activity. What we did a lot of, Greg, is in training is we made it very difficult. You know, we basically made it more difficult than you're going to find it when you went into the customer situation. And, you know, that put the guys in a really good state so that when they went into a customer situation, they felt like, well, that was a lot easier than the training I was in.

28:41Yeah. Yeah. So you raise their ability to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Yes. And to the customer situation, which wasn't as uncomfortable. And then that put them into an extremely fearless state. And the other thing that I think Mac does is he's intuitively higher brain, which is a blessing. And, you know, you talk a lot about your father in the book and how you learned so much from him in terms of work ethic and things of that nature. But I think that because you're intuitively higher brain, you're able to get into those uncomfortable situations because our lower brain wants to avoid our lower brain wants comfort.

29:28our lower brain easy our higher brain realizes that life begins on the edge of our comfort zone why because that's where we can learn and grow the most and learning and growing is the greatest joy in life that release we call higher brain dopamine which we always have access to and there's unlimited supply as opposed to lower brain dopamine which is something through an external gratification, winning a game, getting something, buying a nice watch, that all fades. But that higher brain dopamine never fades. But on the flip side, we can all learn this stuff, even if we were not born, and very, very few people are born or had the life situations that made them intuitively higher brain.

30:15But we can all learn this stuff now. Now we have a system structure to do it and to get there and i would almost argue uh a lot of times it's a big advantage to be lower brain and learn to be higher brain because now you have control of it now you can access it all areas of your life all the time so it's not and if you're not intuitively higher brain it's not a problem in many ways it's a plus um but either way that's where we want to go But if we don't have a system of structure to get there, it's almost impossible. I mean, humans are wired like animals. It's the pain. We're touching on the pain pleasure syndrome, right?

31:01Like humans will do anything to gain pleasure and anything to avoid pain. Yeah. And I always tell this story. Maybe I should tell this. It's a true story. So I was going to go out many years ago to the movies, you know, when people still went to the movies with my wife. and I came home on a Friday night and got showered, got dressed, came downstairs. And she said, we're not going to the movies. I said, well, why not? Because Gray Boy, the cat, is up in a tree. I said, well, he'll come down. And she said, no, cats don't come down from trees. And I said, well, I don't ever remember listening or reading a story that anybody told me that they were sitting under a tree and a cat just fell down out of the tree.

31:45So they must come down. I said so why don't you call the fire department She said I called the fire department But they don't get cats out of trees anymore I said okay well it's going to rain later Tonight You know maybe he'll come down Well I'm not going to the movies until we get him down Okay So I go out back and I grab a hose And I say to my wife Turn on the hose And you know I have one of those faucets that you just turn But the water hadn't been in there For a while so you heard the noise as the water started to come out and the cat heard it and shot higher up in the tree. So what I did is I went and got a ladder out of the garage and came and grabbed the hose and went all the way up the ladder to where I'm on the roof.

32:30And I shoot, because what I'm trying to do is cause pain. He's more pleasurable in the tree right now. I'm trying to get water on top of him where he says, that's more pain. I'll go down where it's more pleasurable, right? So I turn the hose on, but as I get the hose on, the dude was fast. He shot up into the top of the tree. And now he's literally on the top branches and he's just wavering, you know, in those top branches all the way up in the tree. And this tree is way higher than my house. Right. And I'm thinking, you know, he's okay up there because it's more pleasurable up there than it is to come down.

33:06You know, he's scared. And he, but said to my wife, well, I don't know what you want to do, but he'll come down because it's going to rain tonight. And, you know, he'll come down. She goes, okay, we'll go to the movies. So we go to the movies, we come back, turn the flashlights on. And there he is still in the top of the trees, just fucking wavering in the tree, right? We go to bed. I wake up in the morning. It's 6am. I got this sliding glass door that opens up near the kitchen and it's raining. And Gray Boy, where's Gray Boy? His nose is on the piece of glass. Like he can't get, he knows he's in pain and pleasure is just on the other side of that piece of glass, right?

33:48I open up the sliding glass door and gray boy comes into pleasure, right? And human beings are no different. We'll do anything to avoid pain and almost anything to seek pleasure. And when you understand that syndrome, especially as a leader, it's a lot easier to get people to, you know, seek out pleasure by causing a little bit of pain that you know is actually helping them, you know, not hurting them, right, but helping them.

34:16John Kaplan: I think that's tied to what the Navy SEALs example too, Greg, is that I think you're put in situations, from a leadership perspective, I think we can all learn this, and from an individual contributor, you put yourself in situations that, you know, you get out of your comfort zone because it allows you to get lost. why is that important because you have to get found like when you get lost you got to get out gray boy had to learn how to get out or get to the pleasure and if you don't get lost you know you're and and i think that's what the navy seals try to do and i think that's what great companies do in training and development they make people very uncomfortable very uncertain very uh you outside of their comfort zones, because it forces you to find a way home.

35:11John Kaplan: And now you have to, like they do in the Navy SEALs, finding the way home is very specific and it's taught. You can't just like, I was going to accuse John of, I felt the hose many times of him spraying the hose on us, but he also told us what home looked like. And he taught us how to get home. And that's, you know, medic, all joking aside, but that's where all this kind of stuff came from. when you're lost this is what it feels like no deals you don't get people are hanging up on you you know when you're found and then he's and then he codified it and something called you know med pic and medic back in the day so there's a couple of cool thoughts there if you don't get lost you're never gonna you're never gonna find new ways to do things yeah if you're getting people lost you gotta make sure you give them the tools so they can get out Does that make sense, Greg?

36:05Oh, yeah. If you just make them lost, then they're going to stay lost and they're going to see no hope. But if you push them to that brink and then you show them the way home, now they love that coach. They love that leader. Not because he was easy, not because he was their buddy, but because he expanded their awareness and made them a better version of themselves. And that's an awesome thing. You know, all great performers fail their way to the top.

36:35John Kaplan: Yes. Fail forward. Fail forward. Yeah. But if we're constantly comfortable and in our comfort zone, we're not going to fail enough to get to where we need to go. You know, and if we're lower brain triggered and failure is too painful for us, then we're going to avoid it. And we might not fail, but we're not going to go anyplace either. We got to be able to take the hits. The best player in the world, Jokovic, at the prime of his career, he won only 48 % of his points. Think about that. The number one player in the world lost more than 50 % of his points and he was the number one player. Why? He could take the hits.

37:22And when he can take the hits, now you can learn from those. They're not failures. I tell my athletes and the people I work with all the time, when you're higher brain you never you never you never lose you either win and grow or you just grow but you never lose yeah okay so now let's say i'm operating in the higher brain um i'm flowing focus is there a difference between being fearless and also reckless is there a line there and how do i know if i'm on the edge of the line I'm just going. Yeah, it's a huge difference. Fearless means that we're going to put ourselves out there and we're going to make the right decision at the right time.

38:09Reckless means that we're a riverboat gambler and we're just taking chance after chance after chance. That's reckless. You know, in a sales situation, a fearless salesperson understands his customer. He understands his product. He knows how to do it. He knows how to provide value so he can get reoccurring sales. He takes time in his process to go through those execution steps thoroughly, and then he closes the sale. That's a fearless salesperson. A reckless salesperson promises the moon, just tries to get a yes, and moves on quickly. Isn't trained, doesn't have the skill set, and just throws themselves into situations where they're bound to lose.

38:56John Kaplan: yeah well reckless and reckless salespeople i find are operating on only the emotions and the actions that are typically in the lower brain yes when it's very it's very hard to be reckless when you're thinking yeah very very hard we're not designed that way you got to be really really something wrong if you're in the higher brain and you're reckless so i think that when you find yourself being reckless, that's a trigger for yourself. Because we're kind of bordering on this. How do you know when you're in lower or higher brain? I think we've identified 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.

39:47John Kaplan: 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? Like, 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.

40:30John Kaplan: 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. And 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 is 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 4-7-8 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 4-7-8 breathing it's amazing how how calm and focused you get and how dialed in you get because you feel, you feel safe.

42:15You're fearless. You're not fearful. Um, so, and there's a number of good Wim Hof 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, there are so many simple things we can do to first off recognize if 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 there's a lot of there's a lot of science behind this but i tell people all the time it's like driving to be a great race car driver all you need to know is the steering wheel, the gas pedal, and the brake.

43:03And 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.

43:30John Kaplan: Remind us of the book again. Great. Yeah. At this time, the book is in rewrite. So amazing. Working on that. But what I did come up with is 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 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 line programs that's really really high to be fair i tell them if you're doing this program i'm gonna make damn sure you finish it i'll call them i'll text them i i make sure they finish it um 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.

44:36And 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 because 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.

45:02John Kaplan: 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. So they get, 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. Because if you're working with a high level athlete or a high performer, they don't have a lot of time or, you know, and their attention is being grabbed.

45:46They need something they can do simply, quickly and have transformational results. and that's been been this program um but i'll uh i'll send you the um the web page for it um and you can put it in the in the description we'll put it in the show notes for sure so like and i'm

46:02John Kaplan: 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 uh 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. Everyone'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, you can to John's point, you can, you can push them harder because you know, they can handle it.

46:43They got the mental skills to handle it. So you can actually train them at a much higher level. So I've got two, two division one 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.

47:00John Kaplan: We're going to get you out to corporate America, buddy, because Johnny and I have got a huge passion around this. I joked 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.

47:48John Kaplan: But the higher up I went in competition, I realized that, you know, when I looked and opened 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 and 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 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 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 ball game 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 blame well 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 you think you're i find it 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 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, I, I failed.

49:53They're so afraid of failure that I got, I got to blame something else. You know, the coach didn't put me in the right role. Um, I didn't get the breaks. Uh, you know, this player had better, uh, training than me growing up. You know, it's my parents' fault. All those victim mode, uh, 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.

50:30If 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 like if in that state now you 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.

51:21We're not going to, and we're not going to stop till we find it. That's, 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. We can, we can live in that state day to day to day until the day we die. And that is what we're going for.

51:41John Kaplan: I love what you're saying, because for me, like I've talked to some people that, you know, I've talked to some Navy SEALs. I've talked to some people that, well, I'll give the Navy SEAL example. One of my favorite examples is when I was obviously enamored with some of the things that the Navy SEAL was doing. I was talking about fear and I was like, you know, putting them up on a pedestal. And what they said to me was, I'll never forget. Hey, dude. Do you know the difference between you and I? And I'm like, yeah, well, you got the training, you got this, you got that, you're fearless. And he goes, no, no, no, no.

52:17He said, I am afraid to do the same things you are.

52:24John Kaplan: I just do it anyways. And there was more behind that because why? But he wanted to say that you're capable of doing everything that I've done or I'm doing, but you got to get yourself to the point that says, but I'll do it anyways. Yeah. And, and they were trained on how to do it anyways piece. You know, we're afraid to jump out of an airplane. Well, they are too, but they jump anyways. Why? Because they have the training. Why? Because they have other people that are watching them and somebody else packed the backpack and all this stuff. And, and I thought that was what I want to just highlight here, Greg, is all this stuff that we're talking about, no matter where you are on the spectrum, there's growth opportunity.

53:13John Kaplan: And I love what that Navy SEAL said was, we're all afraid of the same things. Some of us do it anyways. And it wasn't like, oh, that's why I'm more courageous than you. When I understood why they do it anyways, I realized that I could probably do that too. not without effort, but I had the ability to do it too. So I love your message today. Yeah. I think for me, lots of things happen to us in our lives. They're like micro events or micro situations. And then there's macro situations. And I always think you have two choices. You can either decide in any of those situations, micro or macro, I'm going to be a victim or I'm going to be a survivor.

53:56That's your choice. And these days you've got too many people that are playing the victim role. I mean, it's almost like an honor for some people in society to play. I'm the victim. Like, I don't really give a shit. You're the victim, right? Go figure, go learn something from it, from that micro situation that happened to you, or even macro situation. If somebody dies in my life or something, I kind of sit back and say, what do I need to learn from this? Why did that happen in my life to somebody even close to me? what am I going to learn and if you don't look at all these situations like a learning situation you're losing the reason that these things are happening to you yeah and talking about what the Navy SEAL said I was watching the Winter Olympics which was great with USA winning the gold medal and stuff I was streaming at the TV at 6 o 'clock in the morning yeah it was awesome but the you know every time an athlete won a gold medal the reporter would stick a microphone in their face and ask them the same stupid question were you nervous and invariably every time the athlete said no i was excited you know so and so it's not a surprise that they won the gold medal they weren't fearful they were fearless and when you're preparing for a big event like in olympics you train four years for maybe an event that lasts less than 10 seconds oftentimes and it's it's your it's kind of it's your life it's everything you put everything into it um but you train all that time for that big event so before that event you are going to be extremely uncomfortable you're going to have butterflies you're going to be sweating your heart rates can be elevated all those things right and you need that that's your body and brain activating for that big event.

55:51But the difference is the people that are unsuccessful are nervous. They're fearful. The people that are successful are excited. They're fearless. You know, the people that are unsuccessful, they're thinking, oh, man, I trained four years for this event. I hope I win. If I don't, that's really going to suck. Man, I hope this goes good. And of course, losing is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or you got the person saying, oh man, I trained four years for this event. It was a great process. I don't know how I'm going to do. I got no idea if I'm going to win or lose, but I put everything into it and I'm going to find out.

56:28Let's go. Right. Like, you know, by bringing it a higher energy level.

56:34John Kaplan: Well, let's talk about, I wanted to get this before we wrap up. I want to talk about this visualization that you talk about because I find it fascinating. And I think there's a lot to learn. there's not one of those athletes that stood on a podium that didn't visualize themselves being there uh that stood on a high podium uh that didn't realize uh that they had the ability to be there i think that's another thing about a navy seal is they've jumped they have a high visualization that they are going to land and they're going to however they also know that there's a probability and a and a possibility of landing in a tree or can you talk a little bit about the power of visualization?

57:15Yeah, obviously, visualization is super powerful. I mean, our brain doesn't know if we're actually doing it or not. So we can actually practice in our brain. And they've done studies in this. People shoot free throws. One group physically shoots the free throws. The other group just visualizes it. And after a couple of weeks, they're shooting about the same. They make about the same improvement. The group that practiced physically is a little bit better, but very small. So visualization is obviously very powerful. But the issue is, if we just think we're going to visualize winning all the time and we do it from a lower brain state, we're actually going to make ourselves more fearful.

57:59And it's actually going to hinder us from being successful. If we can visualize in a higher brain state, and to your point, not just the winning. Of course, we visualize that. But visualize the hardships, visualize the struggles, visualize what our reaction is going to be to a difficult situation. Now, when we get in that situation in real life, I just had a golfer, in fact, who was really struggling. I came down here to Florida for two days. I worked with him, went back up north, and we started visualizing things that went wrong on the golf course and how he would react to them. because the problem was his reaction was off.

58:45And once he started doing that, he actually won his tournament yesterday, which was very amazing.

58:52John Kaplan: I wanted you to talk about this because this is something that I learned from you in your first book that you're rewriting now is this. It's not visualization that has a happy reward every time. The most successful people they found that use visualization are the ones that insert friction. Yes. And that is so powerful. That is when the customer says no, and you've done everything right in a sales cycle, and the customer says no, and you're not prepared for the no, like if you should prepare yourself for the no means, hey, I'm still in the game. A no wasn't get out. A no was just like, you know, a non-agreement on something that we're talking about.

59:40John Kaplan: And I think that, you know, one of my favorite examples is Michael Phelps. He got so bored. His brain was so weird. And they've done a lot of studies on his brain. But he actually used to, he was bored in the pool. So he would actually visualize, he would do the races by closing his eyes. And this is a true story. He won a gold medal. And he broke a world record. and his glasses, whatever those things, those goggles, they filled up with water and they came off. So he had to swim with his eyes closed. Yeah. And he won the gold medal. And you can Google that story and I think it's so powerful. Now he did it because he said that when he was a kid, he was bored and he was being, you know, the coach was telling him to, you know.

1:00:32But for people like us, like if we visualize what could go wrong,

1:00:37John Kaplan: And I think that's one of the things that the Navy SEALs do. I think that's one of the things that corporate America does really well if they do training correctly. You put people in uncomfortable situations, which allows them to insert friction. Yeah. I love that. I absolutely love that. Go ahead. Go ahead, Greg. And then, Johnny, what did we miss here today, man? A lot, but people are going to have to find out on Greg's website. Holy smokes. buddy we know he said we can always have him on again later yeah when's the when's the rewrite going to be you're going to come out with that this year uh yeah probably in uh late september awesome buddy we'll have you on again to launch that and then is is there a website right now that's up and going yeah it's uh well it's my main website now is the 21 day program okay funneling everyone into the 21 day program because that moves the needle the fastest and has the best effects and then yeah i find that's the the best way and then after that they'll move into individual coaching group coaching i have a few different options that they could do after that to go to even higher and higher levels but to be honest with you the 21 day program i would love that both you guys would check it out um only takes a day um and it's it's just as long as you don't make mcmahon my accountability partner i want you for my accountability partner i need compassion.

1:02:05John Kaplan: Great to see you again, brother. Amazing. That's great. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Johnny Kaplan, thanks again. Thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders podcast.

1:02:26John Kaplan: 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.