Your Most Underestimated Performance Tool In Any Daily Challenge - Breathing

[MUSIC] In times of rapid acceleration, high pressure, and general uncertainty, the reality is clear. Professionals are struggling. They have become more mentally and emotionally exhausted, less curious, more stressed, and less giving. Adding to this is the complexity around solutions with the overabundance of protocols, supplements, and so-called performance hacks. The end result, as leaders are more distracted, and have less mental agility, poorer performance, and struggle to be the belief builder and energy multiplier for their teams. We don't want to accept that. Our passion is to help professionals be more. These conversations help illuminate your thinking into sustainable human performance, learning real solutions to improve your energy, focus, and ultimately increase your impact. This is the TIGNUM Thought Cast. [MUSIC] Today's episode, your most underestimated performance tool, breathing. With special guest Rachel Vickery, renowned performance coach to business leaders, athletes, and elite military units, we hope you enjoy it. [MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome to our bold round table. Today at our table, we have all of you, of course, an amazing expert on human performance under high stress, Rachel Vickery. For those of you that don't know, Rachel, Rachel specializes in guiding leaders in an array of fields, all to excel in environments characterized by high pressure and significant stakes. Her clientele, very completely from stand out professionals in elite sports, business, medicine, and elite military units across Australia, New Zealand, and the USA. But there's always one common element of all of Rachel's clients, and that's that they're always seeking a competitive edge. And they have to deliver under the highest stress possible. When I first met Rachel, I thought we were going to focus on breathing and breathing mechanics, the power of using breathing to balance our stress response. But quickly I realized that although she is a true expert in the area of breathing, she has so much more to offer. And we're going to dig into that. And one thing that really makes Rachel unique, that I love, Rachel is the expert that all of us other experts go to to learn. So she's the one that challenges our thinking, expands our toolbox, helps our clients. So this is really the holy grail when it comes to performance. So welcome Rachel, let's jump right in. >> Scott, thank you so much for having me. What a humbling introduction. I really hope that I can live up to that. Thank you so much. >> Yeah, you always just inspire me so much. And so as we're talking to our bold members, and we look at what it takes to be bold. To me, you are the perfect example of that. And clearly your work impacts so many different people to achieve their great performances. Where do you get your passion from to do the work you do as a consultant, a mentor, and a coach? >> Oh man, that's such a great question. I think fundamentally I believe in humans. And I think having had an experience, so my background I was in like gymnast was where I started life. And I was six years on the international team, four news yellings. Your members are here that I talk funny. And so I'm actually a Kiwi, so a news yellender, but I live in Australia. But as you said, and the intro travel kind of all around the globe. And so I think you know, six years on the international team in a sport like gymnastics, especially at such a young age, you learn a lot. You learn a lot about performance environments. You learn a lot about high pressure environments. Learn a lot about human behavior, under pressure, at the good end of the bad. And I think that that probably gave me that first exposure to, I guess, what changes and how people think and act in some of those environments. But I always found as an international athlete, it felt like there was some missing pieces and so far as guidance for people around me who actually understood what that felt like to be a relative outlier. I think if you want to be world class at what you do, you want to be best in the world at what you do, by statistical deviation, you're not going to fit into norm. So you're going to think different, you're going to act different, you're going to have different beliefs. And just everything about who you are and how you operate. And I think it can feel really quite lonely when you feel like you're out there on your own, different from other people. And so the people that I get to work with are generally really good people who have to do or choose to do big and difficult things for the benefit of many people around them. And I think that just inspires me. And I think there's a lot that I wish that I'd had when I was going through some of those experiences. And I can see those commonalities across all of the different performance arenas that I work in. And so anything I can do to help serve those leaders who have big purposes, who need to do big and difficult things where many people's lives or livelihoods are dependent on that, man is such a privilege and such an honor. Yeah, it is incredible how the work that we do gives us as much energy as we hopefully give to others. But it also amazes me like when I think of you or I think of a coach, a coach is one of those jobs where you have to be on. You don't get a second chance. Like when you're in front of a client, a client's paying you, but also asking and being vulnerable to you to ask for your help, you have to bring your best. And in that way, it's somewhat like what you're preparing your clients to do, which is deal with their emotions, deal with their anxiety or stress. And so what are some of the fundamentals? As you work with business people, surgeons, military people, athletes, what are some of the common fundamentals that you see that lead to high performance? Yeah, I answer that in a sec. If I can just start, I guess, where you've added the question, in terms of that alignment as a coach, right? And the necessity that we have to be on all the time, I think there's also a deeper level to that, right? And so far as if I'm asking someone to trust the guidance and advice of it, I am giving them so that they can do big and difficult things, you know, in high stakes scenarios. It's almost fraudulent or inauthentic and completely laxintegrity if I'm actually not living the same values myself. Does that make sense? And it's like, how can I ask you to trust me if I'm not showing up in the same way and bringing my best in living those same values? And it's even similar to what we were talking about, just before we started recording. And so far as if I can't, they come and high pressure scenarios then I shouldn't be teaching other people how to do it. You know, I had an interesting experience just recently. I was up in the UK and I was invited onto one of the military bases and I was just doing a brief for training staff and about 10 minutes before we started, none of the AV equipment was working, you know, and they were starting to get a little bit sort of flustered, you know, to try and get it sorted. There wasn't a tech expert in the room at the time. And one of the guys looked at me and was like, aren't you getting stressed? And I'm like, well, what's the point of me getting stressed, you know? And also, if I'm getting stressed about something as simple as AV equipment not working, I shouldn't be on stage talking to you guys about what I'm about to teach you, you know. So I think that it really is that piece of complete integrity is a very important personal value for me. And it's that importance of showing up with integrity that what I'm asking others to do. I'm also prepared to do myself. So I think that's critical for a coach when you really are guiding particularly high performers that there is that alignment and the congruence between what I'm asking you to do and how I'm prepared to show up myself. And yes, it's a high standard. It's an unbelievably high bar. But I think that's what gives us the ability to work with the best in the world, right? Is that we all understand that there's that tribe of common values of, you know, excellence integrity, all of those sorts of things. So in terms of what, you know, in terms of what some of the fundamentals are, you know, generally when I'm talking about performance in high pressure environments, there's a couple of critical time points we want to look at. That's the acute go time moment. So in that moment of execution, have you got that ability to stay in control of what we call your physiological stress response? And that's very different from your mental or emotional ability to handle pressure. You know, most of the people that I work with have the mental, physical, emotional, even spiritual, resilient to do difficult things. But that doesn't mean that their physiological stress response isn't getting out of control underneath the surface of all of that to the point that it can start to change things like decision making, situational awareness, fine motor skills, you know, some of those, some of those pieces, right? So there's the necessity and the ability to be in control of that arousal state that stress response at go time. But there's also the importance then of making sure that as you come into your performance arena, that whatever it is that you have enough buffer in the system, that can absorb that normal increase in arousal that you always tend to have at go time, you know. And generally we get that increase in arousal because of generally at your go time moment, there's a couple of key things there. There's generally a high consequence of outcome. There's generally a degree of unknowing certainty. generally a degree if you're a bit outside your comfort zone and then if you're an athlete, there's a couple of other things that'll play into it in that environment as well, right? So you've got to have enough buffer to absorb that or you come into the moment. So have you front loaded in that short term. But they're more importantly generally, the people that are, you know, world class, top of the game, business, military, medicine, doesn't matter what it is. It's not just a one-hit wonder, do you know what I mean? These people and our people that were so privileged to work with are in these environments for long periods of time where it's high pressure, high stakes over months, years of a career, those sorts of things. So what are we doing to set people up to manage that across those periods of time? So they're not heading, you know, physiological burnout and getting to the point that they're making, you know, poor decisions or even unethical decisions depending on the environment. So it always comes to the basics, you know, sleep nutrition, you know, looking after your body, optimal breathing, you know, all of those basic things that we know and I'm sure your members have been bombarded with about those importance of those basics. But then there's some of that much deeper piece around, you know, who am I? What am I about? You know, have I am I challenged by things like fear of not being good enough, fear of other people think, fear of failure, fear of success? Have I got my own stuff kind of squared away so that I'm not triggered, you know, in some of those environments. So, you know, I haven't got those things, I guess, playing at the back of my mind when I step up into a performance, you know, environment. And and if I I sum all that up in a in a story I often talk about with an NBA basketball player, who's free throw percent when I first started working with him, his free throw percent in a game was low 20s but in practice it was high 70s and anyone not familiar with basketball or free throw, obviously it's what we call a closed skill. It's very reproducible. You're doing it in the same spot. You set up almost exactly the same theoretically you shouldn't have that sort of percentage drop, you know. And so what was happening for him, you know, on the line was his self talk because of, you know, what all my teammates think if I missed, you know, especially that they need started to have a bit of a failure cycle. So, I've missed, you know, a few times and he was getting targeted but, you know, now he's on the spot and he'd have that what do my teammates think, what if I miss what, you know, so have that in the moment stuff going on in his head but he also had a lot of stuff going off court, you know, contract year, you know, girl issues, you know, all of that sort of stuff. So, they actually helped to crack that for him and we got him back up to within a pretty quick time frame of, you know, his his percentage being relatively equal but there was strategies we had to teach them in the moment to controllers arousal state and some of that started up with breathing and clearing his mind and just being able to reproduce physically. But also there was a lot more front loaded work we needed to do with him, you know, on terms of everything that was going on for him in life and clear that up so that he wasn't operating at a higher arousal state all of the time. Yeah, such great examples and you hit so many things that I'd love to dig a little deeper in, you know, one is this population that you're dealing with, with it also fascinates me because you're talking about some of the fears that they're addressing and some of the things that contribute to this high arousal state. And yet in many ways I could argue there's this certain kind of machismo where they don't really want to admit that they need your help and you've been doing this for a long time. How do you lower their resistance? Like if I think back to the fire department when I first introduced anything around mental training and mental skill training and we call how to think called mental aspects of performance and then we had another one that we created called behavioral emergency services training or best training around helping people show up at their best. And I was people labeled me as the love guru, the love teacher like look at Pelton, he's trying to soften all the firefighters and I'm like nothing could be farther for well, softening firefighter probably a smart thing to do, but that was not my intention. I can only imagine the resistance you face, which also says that many of our members probably even have an inner resistance. Yeah and you know what I found really fascinating. The majority of the environments that I will work in are male environments and often alpha male environments you know and and yet I haven't generally hit that resistance and I think there's a couple of reasons for that and I'll say this really lightly a little bit tongue in cheek but I think being five foot two in female straight away I'm not perceived as a threat in terms of that very primal alpha perception of hey this is going to be a you know an alpha male you know idea I say it on a podcast, pissing competition around I have to do you know the main there is that natural kind of the alpha defense right so I think just naturally I bypass that second I think turning up into an environment where as we talked about right with the lead of this I still look after myself I train exceptionally hard I have very high standards for myself which means that when I walk into an environment there is it actually especially some of those environments are okay you actually look like you walk the talk you know and that fires a degree of credibility I think in trust and respect so I think there's that piece too and I think that's why it's so important that we do as coaches practice what we preach and have even higher standards for ourselves than we do for the clients that we work with but then I think I come in it not from a fixed broken but it's a create awesome and I think unfortunately that's often seen as oh you're coming into fixed broken or when things aren't working it's a hey let's fix broken and on the opposite I'm like you know what let's create kick our source because if you intentionally strategically look at how do we really optimize performance and that's where I come in with this it's actually about optimizing performance it's not just making sure you're in a vertical mental health okay you know I'm not a psychologist I don't have in say that I play in the in a vertical is mental health performance space I optimize physiological stress response and as a result of that there's some really deep human behavior stuff which buys you know which is the stuff around some of those human fears and stuff doubts and insecurities but that's not that we're looking to you know when I talk about don't fix broken create awesome if you think about that if we just fix broken and in a vertical is that doesn't buy default give you awesome you actually have to intentionally strategically go you know how do we create the best version in performance that we can create and how do we actually do that and so I think that's usually where I we're not I think that's actually where I start when I come into any performance environment is hey I'm here to optimize performance and we get that we get that uplift in performance really quite quite quickly which also then starts to get the buy in from people but also because I talk about the physiological stress response you know and that's that difference between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system right and that when we're operating in sympathetic nervous system or that fight and flight that is when we tend to get you know faster heart rate our smart decision brain goes offline we're breathing or tense up our muscles will tense up our digestive system switches off we lose peripheral vision auditory awareness but that shows up in ways that will affect our thinking and also affect our body right so for in that sympathetic nervous system if you think about it from a very primal perspective it's basically don't die there's a threat that I'm perceiving in my environment and I need to make sure that I the buzz not high enough to stay alive it's basically don't die right and so that also changes our thinking we do tend to go more into scarcity mindset thinking around what if I fail what if this happens what you know that if that happens we we hesitate we second guess we take feedback on quite defensively if we're in that state you know as humans we are very we like to think we're very smart right that we're very intelligent beings but biologically we're actually feeling beings that think not thinking beings that feel so our thought processes are often more driven by our physiology and so when I start and I'm presenting and I present this basic model around you know the difference between the fighting flight and the rest and digest nervous system and what that looks like in real life and then more importantly what will contribute to escalating our rousal state to the point that you know we tend to operate just under threshold I've got this list of about 14 things that I'll that I'll put up and I'm happy to share that slide and you can you know pop it into into any sort of notes but there's a list of about 14 things that will contribute to escalating someone's a rousal state to what we call alistatic load and then I'll ask a group of audience and again remember group of alpha males in particular you know who in the room has identified with at least three or four of these in the last you know four weeks and without fail every hand goes up and these are things like you know fear of failure fear of not good enough fear of what other people think you know poor sleep chronic pain you know uncontrolled monkey brain risk of that constant cheddar in the head you know high sugar diet like if confidence high consequence of outcome is a whole lot of things on their list right and things that to your point you would normally assume that you know a lot of alpha hyperformers and I don't just mean males when I talk alpha performance right but people who have high standards push hard want to want to achieve want to be outside of of norm you those are the things that you would often think hey no people aren't going to identify with that now that used to surprise me that every hand would go up you know and then the next question I'll usually ask the room is if you look left and right at your teammates would you have thought they were experiencing the same stuff and usually again inevitably it's like you know not at all because the tendency is that we all look at everybody else and we see their mask and we think everybody else has got it all put together and you know whatever but we are feeling all of this stuff inside that we know our fears self-doubt some securities things that are less than optimal and so that then undermines our confidence even more because we think, well, I'm feeling this, the only one feeling it, I'm obviously not cut out for the environment and that starts to undermine confidence. When we actually put it right out in the open like that and we just normalize it, that thing gives us a start point to go, awesome, see this stuff on this list, this doesn't mean you messed up broken week or not cut out for the environment, this just makes you a human being. And now that's our start point and now we optimize from there and we actually train you how to work with these things and have them optimized for your performance, not actually undermining. But if you don't even acknowledge that it's there, then you can't even train for that. Because one of the things that I'll see often in the environment is what I call the technical, technical, hope strategy. People practice really hard, they get really good at the technical and tactical aspects of their craft. Like they get world-class at that, right? But then they just hope that it's going to show up under pressure without actually understanding that learning how to train and control for their arousal state, both how it affects their body, their decision making, their situational awareness, every aspect of their mind and their belief. If they don't actually understand that, hey, that's a real normal thing and it can be trained for, then they're leaving performance to hope. Our true world-class, consistent competitors, who can just, or performers, operators, business people, whatever, they've got some of those strategies that says no matter what gets thrown at me, I've got this tool in my back pocket that says, hey, I deploy this technique. So I'm not just reliant on, hey, it's my comfort zone. Yes, I've done a hundred presentations to the board and it doesn't stress me anymore. Yeah, but what happens if now a whole brand new thing comes out of left fields and you don't have an intentional skill or strategy to be able to handle that? It was really interesting, relatively recently, and just coming back to that list of things that I was talking about and then people identifying that with that. The last time I did that and again, an elite military environment, people that have been in those environments for many, many years and one of the comments from the room when I said, who's identified with at least three or four of these and last three or four weeks? The question from the room was, you mean only three or four? Do you know what I mean? As in, I could probably identify with most of the things on the list and again, so common and so normal. And I think they just helped people go, oh, this is normal, this is okay. And there's no resistance there because we're not saying that you're not challenging you on your mental toughness then we're actually saying this stuff's going on. Let's actually optimize for it. - Yeah, it is quite interesting, you know, when we talk about this allostatic load, this total load and how much of it is emotional, which is often invisible. And then some of it physical, which you could see because you're traveling, so you have jet lag, give long days. So of course that makes sense. And then of course there's the cognitive load trying to remember things. And you mentioned this idea of doubling down on technical and tactical skills. And what I've experienced is that many people do that because it's easier to say I had a technical breakdown than a mindset breakdown. Like that would be tough or to say I choked, you know, the famous John McEnroe in the French Open final against the Von Lendel, the last thing he would have said at the moment, now we will because he's mature, that he choked, he would have certainly said, well my backhand broke down or my serve failed me. And in reality it was exactly what you talked about, being able to control the physiological response to stress at the moment. And yet because no one would talk about it and they were in denial, then they just kind of pushed it aside. And so that's why I love about what you're doing. But I want to come back to something that you mentioned. So you mentioned this idea of a buffer. So these basic habits, these fundamental things we do that will help us deal with this allostatic load. And you mentioned optimal breathing. So I want to come back to it because so often, and we do this also, we talk about breathing in the critical moment. But when I hear you talk about the buffer and optimal breathing, I somehow envision you're actually talking about my breathing through the rest of the day. What does that mean to you and how do you teach that? It's got-- I'm so grateful that you've phrased it like that because one of the things that I'll often push back on this is being known as the Invertechomas breathing lady because breath work in Invertechomas has become such the shiny performance hack these days that it drives me nuts. My background originally was as a physiotherapist and some of our physiotrining was in respiratory mechanics and the true side of breathing. And I think this story I'll tell you is going to answer almost the first part that you're talking about what breaks down with the technical technical, but also the breathing thing, right? So I had a professional golfer come to see me, and this is many years ago now, and he had his procard up in the US, and it hit a form slump and then he lost his card, and he ended up moving back home in debt and it was back living with family. And I've been working with psychologists for many years and a psychologist had referred him into come see me about a year before he finally did, and he comes in to see me one morning. First time I've met him and he said, look, Rach, just tell me you've actually made the decision this morning that I'm done with, golf, I cannot crack this. And he goes and to be honest, he goes, I don't need to learn this breathing crap. He used a more common Australian phrase for that, but he said, I don't need to learn this, this breathing crap because it doesn't work. And the site's been doing it with me for eight years and it doesn't work. He said, fantastic, I said, tell me how the psychologist uses breathing with you to control your state. And he said to me, well, as part of my pre-shot routine, I step off the ball, I take three nice calming breaths, I step in, I address the ball, and I play my shot, fantastic. I said, how many shots in a pro-round? He looks at me like I'm a complete idiot, you know? And he said, well, about 70. And I said, fantastic. I said, how long are you on the course for? And he said, anywhere from four to four and a half hours, and I said, okay, great. So what you're telling me is of the four and a half thousand breaths you're going to do in that whole round, 210 of them are designed to inner verticals set your state, but the other, you know, 99.6% you're leaving completely to chance. And it kind of looked at me like, I haven't got this breathing so well sorted, have I? And I was like, not at all. To your point, we do 20,000 breaths in a day. So actually how you do those 20,000 is going to get you into more trouble or optimize your performance. More than those, you know, five calm breaths, you do that 30 seconds of whim-hoff, that five rounds of box breathing, like whatever shiny technique you use is not going to undo the negative of those other 20,000. And so what was happening with that goal for if we use him as an example? You see this all the time in performance environments. As he would practice his swing in a relatively relaxed state, elite performers know exactly where they need to position their body to execute their thing, right? And so he'd come in and he'd practice his swing and he'd know how to position himself and his back, and his back swing and his follow through beautiful. When he then got into his performance environment, because he was now nervous and anxious, what if I don't make the cut, if I don't make the cut, I don't make payday, if I don't make payday, I'm not supporting my family. And he'd get in all of that head noise start to creep in. That head noise would start to turn on his threat response, which was one of those things as we talked about, actually makes us breathe more with our upper chest, because it's part of our primal response of, I'm either going to run or I'm going to fight, but I need more air. So generally what will happen in a stressful environment is our brain or automatically make us start to breathe a bit more upper chest. So for that goal for in that moment, as his breathing would become more into his upper chest, the same muscles that we use to breathe in our upper chest are funnily enough, also the same muscles that a goal for needs to position the club, for the optimal swing. And so biomechanically, his swing was actually changing because of what was happening in his head and in his physiology, and it was actually biomechanically changing something. Exactly the same as that NBA basketball all of that we were talking about earlier. So that's actually not choking in your head, right? That's, and this is actually a really critical breakthrough that a lot of performance people have. There's something they go, oh, in this goal, for it looked at me and it was like, when I explained all of this to him, I said, your swing is actually biomechanically changing, which is why you don't feel like the same goal for that you feel like. You feel like you've lost the feel. You feel like the clubface is hitting the ball at a crazy angle and you've got no control of the nuances of where the ball is going. And that's why it's, but you're trying to solve it in your head rather than actually we need to try to solve that more in your body and within your biomechanics, right? And so what we were actually able to do is yes, we gave him some, in a vertical, as breathing strategies for in the moment, bringing him back down into his diaphragm. But more importantly, how is he breathing when he was walking between the shots? How is he actually breathing most of the day? So he was operating at a better arousal state. So there's that physical change that we will get in terms of the biomechanics. But the other thing, if we come back to that arousal state that we get is, you know, I said that when we perceive a threat and you've got to remember that our physiology, our body responds to our thoughts in the same way that's going to respond to an actual real event happening around us. And so you can be sitting at a computer stressing about a deadline or a presentation or a board meeting or whatever. And that's going to actually be turning on that threat response all the time. And so the brain, the limbic system, will send a message down to the breathing muscles saying, Get ready. get ready to go, breathe upper chest, something important is going to happen. But actually there's a message that goes from those breathing muscles back up into the limbic system, that emotional control center in the brain, and it gives input as to physiologically which state are you in. And so if you're an upper chest, breathe it all day every day without realizing that that was just your natural breathing person. You're actually sending 20,000 data points into your limbic system, queuing threat danger, threat danger, threat danger. And so what you end up doing is you feel like you're operating at a more heightened arousal state all of the time. You can't switch off, your mind's always busy, you always feel anxious, you're always kind of scanning your environment for, you know, where's the threat, where's the danger, where's the thing that's going to go wrong. You might try to do your five minutes of mindfulness to, you know, calm down, but that doesn't undo that input from those other 20,000. So, you know, without going too far into the depths of breathing, because obviously that would be a hot podcast in and of itself, right. There's two really critical things that will change. It will change the biomechanics of how we do what we do. It will also change our arousal state, you know, far more in terms of the baseline breathing and how we're breathing all of the time. That was actually the thing that got me into this right in the first place. I had this gymnastics move I would do when I was a competitive athlete to start my beam routine. It was very difficult and it was basically a blind entry backwards, some assault to land on one leg on something that's 10 centimeters wide, you know. And I could do that perfectly in training. I could do it perfectly in low level competitions. On big internationals, my timing was, as I was coming into enter the board, would be just a little bit off and I'd fall and if you fall off the beam, it's a difference between gold, metal and bottom, bottom of the pack, you know, such a significant error penalty. But to your point, I would practice the move over and over again because I thought it's the move that's the problem. I've got to practice that technical piece. What I hadn't put together was in that moment because I had heightened arousal, you know, because of, hey, it's a competition. But more importantly, there was a lot of fear for me around if I fall, what's the feedback going to be from the coaches, you know, because it was quite an abusive environment. And we see that in military environments, don't we? We see that in corporate environments, you know, if there's poor leadership and there's a lot of punishment for failure, you know. So that will plan to stuff a lot. So I'd have that as I was saluting to the judge about to start my routine and everything would actually change by mechanically for me. But that was also sitting on top of a very, you know, abusive toxic environment that was fear driven coaching and all those sorts of things at the best of times, plus trying to manage school and all those sorts of things. And I didn't have a solution for that, you know, it cost me a medal at a big international. And that sort of started that whole journey for me in trying to work out, you know, how do we fix this? How do we work with this? So breathing wise, yes, there's how you're breathing at that moment. But ideally, all we want to do in the moment is try to replicate breathing as to however you've practiced your skill, right? Or if you're doing a presentation or whatever, making sure that you're doing a few breaths down into your belly. But we link that with some other cues as well, particularly vision. And then more importantly, how are we working on your breathing? Say you're a good breather all of the time, which is going to give you significant buffer in your nervous system to absorb for, you know, go time moment. Yeah, so let's just come back since we're on the topic of breathing because I think this is an area that people hear so much about, you know, if you go to yoga, you hear about pranayama and then you know, you whim-hoff you mentioned and he teaches a type of hyperventilation and breath holding. And so now you have a bunch of people doing breath hold. If you read James Nester's book on breath, it's all about nasal breathing and never breathing through your mouth and trying to use that. If you listen to Hoobermann, it's about a double paused inhale with a long exhale. And then if you read about the Navy seals, it's about box breathing. And before you know, and everyone's confused and they start to think, ah, I should have used equal breathing, but I used box breathing and my problem was I breathed through my mouth. But when I hear you, it sounds so much simpler. So now imagine I'm one of your clients. Teach me just the basic mechanics. I'm looking in the mirror. What do I want to do to get me to breathe correctly? Awesome. First principles of breathing, right? We keep it so simple. We come back to how was the house of body designed to breathe. And with all due respect to some of the shiny things out there, you know, you've got it also, they're commercially driven, right? The Navy seals don't use box breathing. That was a technique that would, and I've got that firsthand from the guy within, you know, who created a lot of the studies and research that they did around what breathing strategies do we use to optimize heart rate variability, heart rate control, you know, and I promise you it's not box breathing. Wim Hof, the reason I push back on that, you know, people get taught that to do it for controlling, let's do that before we get in the ice bath and we do ice baths at controller rails on the state. Okay. However, in the real environment, you don't have time to say to the person or the thing or the serious event or whatever's coming out of left-field sideways, please just pause. I need to do my two rounds of 30 second Wim Hof breathing before I engage with you. Do you not mean like we actually have to go, if that thing comes flying up from sideways and it's enough that it escalates my arousal state, man, I don't have preparation for that and I need to know how to de-escalate it immediately. Let's put that in box, put it aside to answer your question, basic respiratory mechanics in and out through the nose, this and we're talking at rest. Now, at rest just means low level activity up to maybe about 60% of full intensity, right? In and out through the nose, your in-spiratory phase or your in-breath is shorter than your out-breath and so generally what we want to see is the out-breath is about one and a half to two times longer than the in-breath and then there's a little pause at the end of the out-breath that's called an end-experitory pause and basically all that is is it's giving the diaphragm time to get back to its resting length before it does its neck contraction. Sitting, if I was watching you, I should see nothing moving with your upper chest, right? All of that breathing should be driven by your diaphragm which is a big dome-shaped muscle down in your abdomen, front to back side to side. All it's doing is contracting and relaxing, contracting and relaxing and it pushes your upper abdomen out of the way. So if I'm just watching anyone eyeballing them, I should see that upper belly just very gently going in and out, there should be silence, there should be rhythmical, there should be smooth, there should be no upper chest movement. And so anyone of your members, the best way to actually self identify that is actually watch yourself in the mirror generally after you've you know maybe had a shower, you haven't got anything on so you can see your upper chest and your collar bones really clearly and put one hand on your upper chest and one hand on your belly and without trying to change anything, just notice what moves because a lot of people think that belly breathing when they've got their hand, you know, but their upper hand is actually moving up and down and as well as their belly one, right? So that should be really, really still and that should be very comfortable. Now the difference, the thing with breathing that gets a little bit complicated is that we can override our default breathing mechanics, right? So when I say default breathing mechanics, it's this part now brainstem that basically there's a little metronome that says, "Scott, this is how many times you're going to breathe, this is how you breathe," and that just happens automatically without you thinking about it and that's awesome because you don't want to have to think about taking those 20,000 breaths, right? But if I said to you, hold your breath, you could do that to command. If I said, "I'd prefer to do that to command," if I say, "Really breathe into upper chest, do it through your mouth," you can manipulate breathing quite well. However, after about 10 minutes or as soon as you're distracted by a shiny thing, you're going to revert back to what that metronome has you breathing and it's a survival instinct, right? And so it's not so important in how you can breathe, it's how you do breathe. So that's why that mirror thing is quite helpful. In terms of exercise, once we start moving hard and fast, then what we start to do is we start to increase the depth of breath and the speed that we breathe. So for someone your frame size sitting here having conversation with me, you might need about six litres of air in and out of your lungs in a minute. It's not very much, but if you are running as hard and fast as you could over time, you might need about 200 litres of air in and out of your lungs in a minute. So that's a huge change, right? So that's why everything you will start using your upper chest, you will start putting more force behind it, and you probably will start mouth breathing because you have to shift that air very, very quickly. Yes, you can train yourself to nasal breathe at high intensity, but it's going to take you many, many months to get there. And it's interesting to know whether there's actually a performance gain in doing it or not. I think there's other ways that you can learn to control both mind and performance by actually focusing on just some of these first principles. The critical thing though is you want to focus when you're exercising on the exhale, on that out breath, doing it with a bit of a personal hip-shape to get the air out. Most people when they're exercising they start getting breathless, they start focusing on the in breath and then pretty quickly they get to the point that they're breathing right at the top of their lungs, they're sucking for air, they're so full that they can't get more air in and their brain starts saying that you can't breathe, I'm not getting enough air, there's a problem back off intensity. Actually, if you focus on the out breath, you naturally make space for the next in breath. So, first principles of breathing and then out through the nose, experience your face longer than the in the in-spiratory, into your belly, smooth, calm, effortless, that's how it should be. Right now, it takes a bit of training to do that, this exercise I'll usually get people to do lying down as a retrain process because as I said breathing is the line between being dead and alive. So when we try to mess with your metronome it's not just the technique. We're also starting to hit some other sort of pretty complex things around breathing. I won't go as too technical for the next 30 seconds. But it takes a little bit of time and people are trying to change it. It can make people feel like there's an air hunger feeling. They're not breathing in long enough, those sorts of things. And often people will just give up because they're like this feels too uncomfortable, this can't possibly be right. So they'll give up on it. Actually you need to go through that feeling of discomfort to come out the back end. The other thing that people can just start to think about is every time they pick up their phone, use that as a tactile feedback just to do a bit of a body scan and a body check. Still keep doing whatever you're going to do on your phone. But just be think three things. Stop, drop and flow. Stop what you're thinking about because you might be a mile a minute somewhere but you won't be present. Drop your shoulders and breathe out because you probably won't realise that you're holding your breath, particularly if you're concentrating on a task or you're under the pump. So you just want to breathe out. The flow part is three breaths in and out to the belly with that smooth flow. You know, not big breath, not noisy breath, just a normal sort of calm breathing pattern. And then you just keep going with what you're doing. Now you might pick up your phone 100 times a day. That's 100 times that you just have it breaking. On those 20,000 breaths, you're just going to gradually start to break that habit over time. Yeah, you you hit again on so many things and I love this kind of checklist in this really simple way and thinking about the breathing away from the moment is also helping my breathing in the moment. And in fact, when I present and when I work with executives to present, I often have them go through a checklist similar what you just described while they ask a question and other people are answering and I'll say that's your moment to check in on your breathing because unfortunately when you're presenting, you can hyperventilate and you can get so hyped up that you need to reset yourself. I'll fill that buffer back up and I'll have them actually use that. So I love this checklist that you went through to stop, drop and flow as a way to check in. Also, even this link that you made between my thoughts influencing my physiology, my physiology influencing my thoughts. And so where do I intervene? You just I think gave us a great place because well, I can pay attention to my breathing. So even if I'm listening to a discussion in a group and someone says something that my brain perceives as a threat, the first place I may actually notice it is the change of my breathing. When my breathing changes, then my thoughts follow. That's what I find. And so the more I go, we'll go back then. I'm your breathing down. Get your thoughts straight here. Refer in this. Listen for the intent behind. Take the threat out of your mindset. Am I capturing this correctly? You spot on it. It's actually we actually use the same concepts when we're looking at trying to de-escalate a situation. So whether that be a scenario in let's say a leak military hostage rescue, any of those sorts of things or a boardroom, right? Or an environment where hey, there's quite a tension in the room. In conversation, you can start to get a little bit heated. Or there's any sort of scenario, it might just be a difficult conversation between a Boston employee. It doesn't matter. But part of that exactly to your point is it will turn on the threat response, right? And so we will start to breathe more with our upper chest. But the other things that will start to change is we'll hold more tension in our face. And so our body language will start to almost go on that defensive. You know, now the other person who's watching that will perceive the change. They'll see the tension in our jaw. They'll see the lifting in an upper chest. And they'll see some of those things change. They'll also sense a change in our vibe. Right? Now straight away, they go, oh no, Rachel's about to go on the attack. I better go on the defense, right? And their walls go up and things shut down, right? And then communication just doesn't happen. And sometimes even worse, it escalates. I've been in environments where I've had a client who I've never met before, right? So I know, well, I presume it's not personal unless they cut them off in traffic five weeks prior without realizing it, you know, but they've walked in. They're just an angry human or stressed or whatever and their energy they're carried out in. And I start talking with them and I can feel myself getting caught up in it, right? And I can, but I've got a choice as the more emotionally intelligent human in the room. I will then intentionally de-escalate consciously. I'll sit back, I'll drop my shoulders, I'll be breathing into my belly. And it's amazing what you'll notice with the other person actually starting to de-escalate themselves because suddenly there's nothing about my physiology, my biology, my physical presentation and that moment that is queuing to them that I am a threat to them. And then they will actually start to de-escalate. And now to your point, now we can have a really smart conversation or now we can actually, I've brought your smart brain back online. It's not been hijacked anymore, right? And so now we can actually have that rational, that rational conversation. And you can see it and you can see people who, particularly I've used this with executives when it is some of those really challenging, difficult conversations around a table, you know, the person who can actually stay in control of themselves enough that they can have those smart decisions. And more importantly, they're in control of what comes out of their mouth. Man, that is critical, right? And so those same techniques are actually exactly the same. I'll still use all of those same techniques. If I'm walking on stage, a couple of thousand, but it doesn't matter, I'll still do that. Look up, you know, because I want to cue my vision to to being that calm, you know, calm vision is when we're either looking up or using our peripheral vision, it actually turns on our calm nervous system as well. So I'll look up, I'll, I'll make sure I'm breathing into my belly. I'll have a gratitude for an opportunity thought in that moment because opportunity and gratitude can't live in the same place of the brain as threat. You know, we're not running away from that line going, I'm so grateful for this opportunity, you know. So we've either got one or the other. So I'll put those three things together. Vision thought and breath right before I walk into a performance arena. And I train other people to do the same. It's unbelievably powerful. But I want to really emphasize, right? And I know you're on board with all of this. And I know it's also what you teach your members is it's not just about that little shiny thing, you know, it's more important about the front loaded stuff where you're, you know, it's about doing those common things and commonly well. And if we use breath work to breathing mechanics as a nice analogy, you know, if you've got really crappy nutrition, right? And you take moldy vitamins, those moldy vitamins might take the edge off the crappy nutrition, but they're not going to really be a game changer. But if your nutrition is awesome and then you take some supplements, those supplements can be game changes, right? Now in that analogy, breath work techniques are like the vitamins, you know, optimizing your breathing mechanics, having all of these other things squared away, you know, that's your baseline. So then these other little techniques at go time can really be the game changer, rather than trying to undo all of the negative everything that's got your arousal state so hyped before you even come into your environment. But then we're just trying to play catch up. Yeah. So you just hear a couple key things that align with a couple of the questions that our members sent in ahead of time, knowing that we were going to have this opportunity to speak. So very kind of specific to sleep because a lot of people struggle with sleep and you mentioned this monkey mind and ruminating thoughts and they said, I struggle like so many people falling asleep, waking up in the middle of the night, getting the struggle to get the quality of sleep I need. How can I use my breathing to improve my sleep? Do you have any ways that, you know, I know we kind of want to do this general checklist. But anyways, at that moment to trigger my parasympathetic or arousal recovery nervous system to get the best sleep. Yeah, really, really good question. And I feel for people on that for sure is most people that are in high pressure environments do tend to be upper chest breathers by default. And so they're breathing all day upper chest, which means they are operating more in sympathetic nervous system physiologically. They might not be feeling stressed and anxious, right? But they're keeping their physiology up. Now, if you think about that in that primal human space, if you're in sympathetic nervous system, your body doesn't want to let us go to sleep because that might be when the lion attacks, right? And so it's very hard to fall asleep in sympathetic nervous system. If there's anything in our physiology that's queuing that. Now, often what people will do is they will get into bed. They'll fall asleep because they're exhausted because they've got that that's sleep depth piece, right? So they'll get those three or four hours. But then that underlying physiology that's playing threat danger threat danger stay awake is going to ramp straight straight back up again. So in terms of using breathing to optimize that, the work that you do on your breathing through the day so that you're actually operating through the day physiologically as a diaphragmatic breather means that rather than 20,000 cues going into the limbic system from your upper chest queuing sympathetic nervous system, if you're a diaphragmatic breather all the time without thinking about it, you're actually going to have those 20,000 breaths into the limbic system queuing parasympathetic or calm, right? So you're generally operating calmer actually when you get into bed in the first place, right? So there's that and that's the kind of front-liding piece and then when you are waking up and you know is is actually maybe even before that when you get into bed intentionally turning on the parasympathetic just by lying and diaphragmatically breathing. Now if you want to count, if you want a special rhythm, if you want to rate, man make it up because it's probably going to be as beneficial as anything else, right? Because again, first principle, so I'm not about prescribing a rate in a rhythm. It's the basic thing is, use your diaphragm, make your out breath longer than your in-breath and gradually try to slow all of that down, you're going to be doing really well. And then if you wake up in the middle of the night, same thing, just bring your awareness, you know, nose, belly, just lie there, belly breathe, let it happen. You're going to turn on your parasympathetic and eventually, it takes some time, but eventually it's going to put you into that calm state that the brain goes, oh, I can't, it's safe to go to sleep now. So that plays right into the second question that someone asked and they said, I've heard so much about the vagus nerve and for those of people that don't know that's the 10th cranial nerve, but it's the primary nerve of our parasympathetic nervous system that relaxes us. So they said, I've heard so much about the vagus nerve and it's important for our rest and recovery. What is the latest research on vagal stimulation and how can I maximize this? And another person asked a question, have you ever seen vagal stimulation tools because they're seeing more and more of those come out now? Even ones that go along like your carotids and help stimulate your parasympathetic or your vagus nerve rather. Do you think that look, that's like vitamins, save that for when your nutrition is perfect and you've tried everything else or maybe they've missed something else? Yeah, I mean, I always like to come back to basics, right? In terms of exactly what you said, I wonder whether some of that is a little bit like the vitamins. I haven't read the latest peer reviewed research about whether those things are actually effective or not. Certainly, I think there's a lot of products on the market. I think there's a lot of commercially driven stuff that's looking to take advantage of how stressed and anxious and overworked and burnt out. Our good people are. And I think that there's a lot that you can benefit from just doing some of these basic things that we are talking about. One of the things I do love training is ice bath training or cold showers, right? Not from the benefit of white knuckling it and sucking it up and telling yourself you can do difficult things by staying in a three degree Celsius ice bath for three minutes. But it's more an environment where you get in and you feel that really big hit of adrenaline. Everything escalates. Your brain goes to, this is ridiculous. What are you doing? Get out of here. This is dangerous. You're breathing speeds up. Your muscles tense up. Your heart's pounding. And it's just a fantastic environment to learn how to, first of all, where does my body and mind go to when I get that adrenaline hit like that? How can I very quickly, without any external tools, self-regulate with dropping my shoulders, dropping my breathing, changing my mind to an opportunity thought or whatever to learn to be able to become in the chaos. It's still going to stay just as cold. But the idea is that you learn to surrender and be very calm and peaceful in that environment, rather than fighting it. Because if you're white knuckling it, you know what I mean by that? Hey, I mean just like basically just sucking it up, dealing with it and going, right, I'm going to just, you know, I can grip through this. But that doesn't teach you a lot because you have to use a lot of energy to whitenuck all that, which means in the real environment, if you've had to put that much energy just into controlling your arousal state, then you haven't got a whole lot of energy for whatever the thing was that set off the threat in the first place, what we call the threat focus, you know. So I like, and cold shower can be the same, you know, for those that don't have a nice bath, you know, it's just getting in with the shower cold, don't have it warm first, just get in as it's cold and then just learn to be in there without reacting to it. And that's your training yourself, not to react to your, not to be reactive to your nervous system, but more importantly to be in control of it. You're still going to get the initial hit, you know, then I'm not going to ask about training for probably five or six years. Now every time I get it, and I still get that adrenaline hit, but the ability to control it within about three to four breaths now is opposed to taking, you know, minutes to get to that point. I like people to have an internal sense of how do I do, skill out my arousal state myself rather than being reliant on some sort of external thing to trigger. I vagus nerve, for example, to put me into that karma nervous system because again, you know, you're not going to always have that on you. And if you haven't learned how to a feel what happens and when you're starting to be aware of earlier in the piece, oh, my breathing's getting tight, or my vision's starting to get a bit narrow or the tension's creeping in my shoulders. Those are some of your first signs. You want to be able to pick that. That's what we call inter-exception, an awareness of what's changing in your mind and body yourself. So I'm not saying that those external things aren't helpful for people, but I think this is bigger and better lifts and gains that you can get by some of these other techniques. I totally, totally agree. I mean, it's funny I was working with a top university and their baseball team and the pitching coach told me I was trying to help them in their bullpen, which is a series of pitches where they practice their routines. I was trying to get them to bring the game day pressure into their minds. That's what they can practice there controlling the moment. And the pitching coach said, no, no, no, no, no, I want them to pitch on the mound like they're pitching a bullpen. And I said, well, that sounds great, but any pitcher, any human, when they step on the mound in a game and there's 30,000 fans and they're screaming, they're brand immediately knows this is not practice anymore. I think you have to do it the other way and you just describe creating those situations. And I like that a lot. Have you ever tried? Do you ever do that with mental imagery where you'll have people even imagine through visualization, that high stress moment, that go moment, and now it's practice right now. What do you feel? Where do you feel it? So they can train their brain how like you said earlier to be thrown into any moment and say, I'm okay, I can control this because to me in the human brain that's always fighting to control something, if it knew it could control that moment, how powerful that would be for anyone. Yeah, I do. And I actually even funny enough, I do mental rehearsal training in a couple ways, one with that visualization, we get people into a relatively relaxed state, there's a third pathway, I'll talk people through so that we've optimized brain waves so that when we then get into the mental rehearsal piece of whatever it is that is their go time moment, they will feel in the now moment to your point, breathing changes, tense, you know, the line there on the ground and tense in their jaw and they're almost getting sweaty palms, which A shows them just how powerful that threat response is woven into their into them, right, which means actually sometimes that threat response is kicking in in the real environment for them just because it's the trained response, right, not because it's actually a real threat and danger, but their nervous system brain goes off, this is what Scott wants, this is the this is the program Scott wants me to play when he's on the man pitching, it's the fear response, okay, I'm going to turn the fear response on, right? So what we want to re re re re wire is basically how can you be on the man's in through the mental rehearsal piece, but in the now moment as someone's working on that, they're still noticing, oh my breathing's tightening up, bring it back into my belly, my tense, you know, shoulders are tensing up, you know, so it's interesting for people to get such an awareness because again what we were talking about, generally the only time you ever really get that adrenaline that that fear response kicking in is when there is another threat focus that you actually have to handle, someone's shooting at me, I have to jump out of a plane, I'm about to pitch to the board, you know, whatever the thing is, you've got other priorities in that moment, right? So if you've ever never actually had some experiences where you can really feel what that feels like mind and body and what changes as a result of the adrenaline hit, you know, I think it's really helpful for us to understand that there's a whole lot of different things that are going to trigger that threat response, but physiologically it's a pretty reproducible, predictable response, right? adrenaline's going to hit, heart rate's going to change, breathing's going to change, muscle's going to get more tense, gut switches off, peripheral vision gets lost, auditory awareness gets lost. Awesome, so we know that, right? Whatever the thing that pushes the button, the button still gets pushed in a certain way, right? And so I'll train that, but what I'll also do is I'll actually also train mental rehearsal in Ispa, right? Or I'll get people to do very difficult cognitive tasks, so if their work environment needs them to be very cognitively sharp in high pressure, high stress environments, I'll get them to find that degree of calm in the Ispa for the cold jauntons of the physiological calm and now go through mentally, it might be you know, practice your foreign language, do some of those complex mass equations, mentally rehearsed, the thing that you're about to do and they'll notice as soon as they go into their head, they start to lose control of their breathing and their heart rate. And so they start to learn how to put the two together so they can still keep their physiology calm whilst they're in that. And obviously that's a pretty extreme and advanced thing for us to be doing and you can probably imagine the types of people that we're doing those sorts of things with, you know? And you're an average, like you just, you know, you're not in those environments, you probably don't need to go to that extreme, but it's very, very powerful. Yeah, and what I do love, though, is you using the mental visualization as a stick like so seldom do I want people to visualize saying their presentation work for word correctly. As much as I want them to visualize controlling their arousal state, being in their best performance so they can do what you just described perfectly, make their brain available to do what it's designed to do to think in the moment, but it can't when it's high jacked. And so this might be a perfect place to and I can't believe it. We're at an hour already. I want to thank you Rachel so much for joining our roundtable and helping us work through these really human challenges of performing our best under pressure and because that is what bold is all about. Taking all of big challenges, getting out of our comfort zone, nobody does it better than you so thank you very very much. Scott, thank you for having me. Cheers. Thank you for listening to the TIGNUM thoughtcast. If you've enjoyed this or any of our other thoughtcast episodes, please subscribe so you don't miss out on future releases. If you'd like to get in touch with TIGNUM, please email us at contact at TIGNUM.com. Until next time, be bold, be more and keep ruling your impact.