The Talent Forge: Shaping the Future of Training and Development with Jay Johnson

The Elite Mindset: Transforming How Athletes and Executives Reach Their Peak with Gary Chupik

• Jay Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 37

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What separates truly exceptional performers from the merely talented? According to mental performance coach Gary Chupik, it's not motivation, talent, or even discipline—it's self-leadership.

Drawing from his extensive work with professional athletes and high-performing executives, Chupik challenges conventional thinking about performance psychology. While most focus on fixing weaknesses, he advocates for a strength-based approach that identifies what's working well and replicates it. This shift in perspective—from the "training room" of mental health to the "gym" of mental performance—reveals hidden reservoirs of potential in even the most accomplished individuals.

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jayjohnsonccg/
Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Jay Johnson:

Welcome to this episode of the Talent Forge, where we are shaping the future of training and development. Today I have a special guest, gary Chupik. Welcome to the show, gary. Yeah, thanks for having me. So you know, when we had connected and I got to take a little bit of look at your background, I was so impressed and I really felt like this is going to be a great conversation. And before we get into that, can you help us, help us understand, gary? How did you get into this space and you know really what's your passion with talent development and people development.

Gary Chupik:

Yeah, so as a mental performance coach, it's really interesting. So a lot of people don't understand the difference between a sports psychologist and a mental performance coach. A sports psychologist would be someone who is a psychologist, so they have the label and have the licensure and then they add a little performance stuff on the end. So 80 to 90% of their education really is psychology, which really discovers maladaptive thoughts and behaviors in their clients. But a mental performance coach looks at what's right with people and then we try and replicate that and share that with others.

Gary Chupik:

So it's, it's, it's I kind of call it all gas, no brakes. And so a mental performance coach, think of someone who, let's say, you're walking through the the which is a true story, by the way but let's say you're walking through a professional football franchise and you're walking in the hallways and you see the training room. So I call that mental health and mental wellness, but you walk through the gym and that's what I call mental performance. And so I think there's I think a lot of people really get, you know, an incomplete view of mental performance and mental health. I think mental health is only part A, I think mental performance is part B, and you got to be able to get stronger. So I think if we can help people get stronger, they can avoid perhaps the training room with getting bruised up and bandaged up and don't get me wrong, there's definitely a need for that. However, I think we sell ourselves short and leave a lot of performance on the table when we don't really get into the gym and get stronger.

Jay Johnson:

Okay, so I love that distinction and I love that background. Now you've worked with a lot of high performance athletes, professionals, all over in a number of different sports. Talk to me what is the process for mental performance training and like what does that look like?

Gary Chupik:

Well, I don't know about you, but you know I've never really baked a chocolate cake before. I've tried, maybe a couple of times, to do something that resembled the chocolate cake, but it hasn't been successful. But one thing I do know that if you're going to bake a chocolate cake, that there's a sequence to the ingredients, mixing the ingredients, and I think in a lot of ways a lot of people have all the right ingredients but they haven't learned how to sequence them properly to get an intended outcome, and so we minimize sequence. And it's one of the things that chat GPT really is not sufficient at. You can get all the right answers, but if you don't sequence it properly you're not going to get the intended result.

Gary Chupik:

So I think helping people understand that there is a sequence to mental performance and for me personally in the way that I present my material, is that the holy grail of all mental performance is not motivation, it's self-leadership. In other words, you don't have to be motivated to lead yourself well. So if people depend on motivation, it kind of wanes up and down, and even for me sometimes it wanes up and down, but if I'm disciplined enough and I'm sort of leading myself really well, motivation really isn't part of the equation. I remember talking to a defensive tackle, starting defensive tackle in the NFL, and I said how important is motivation to you? And he said, at my level it's not. And I think most professional athletes would do that. In fact, a couple of years ago I attended a mental performance conference where they had just sort of outstanding speakers who worked with the highest athletes in the world and we I don't even know if the word motivation was ever, ever uttered for like two straight days.

Jay Johnson:

So it's actually Motivations I mean. To that regard. Motivation is unsustainable. It's so expensive to the brain, like just the very act of willpower, and motivation is taxing and a number of different studies. Everything from the legal system, like our decisions at the end of the day or our motivations to do things at the end of the day significantly drop because of the energy that it takes and the energy that we expend. So I love that you're bringing that up. Motivation is probably not. But talk to me a little bit. Dig deeper on, you know, dig deeper on the other side of that. So that leadership, that self-leadership, what does that look like? Is that discipline? Is that routine? Is that habits? Is that? What is that?

Gary Chupik:

Yeah, that's an outstanding question. I think for me it really stems from an understanding of how I build my own self-leadership number one and then how I sort of expand that to reach other people groups. So, for example, I have something that I teach called the leadership pyramid, and the bottom of the pyramid is self-leadership. The next level is couple leadership, and I don't mean romantically, I just mean that you're able to coach or mentor or be an example to somebody else, and if you can do that well, then you can do group leadership and if you do that well you can do area or department leadership and finally you can do organizational leadership. But what it does is it sort of gives a pathway for a lot of people to figure out how to promote themselves. And I don't mean like socially promote themselves, I just mean, yeah, there's a lot of opportunities. If you live your life well and you self-lead, then you're going to get opportunities to lead in organizations.

Gary Chupik:

And the thing I think the secret sauce with this self-leadership thing is that it never ends Like you have to continually keep that blade sharp and as soon as you start compromising your self-leadership, that's when organizations start to crumble, and that's primarily because of the leadership of the primary leader, like, for example, here in Seattle. It's Boeing. I'm not afraid to say that Boeing has terrible leadership, who passes on responsibility for things that go wrong, and so when your leadership at the very top doesn't go well, the entire business suffers, and Boeing is a clear example of that. Not to bash anybody, but I don't mind being honest. So yeah, no one's plucking Boeing executives because of their leadership. You know they're taking Amazon. They're plucking Amazon. They're plucking Costco, they're plucking Expedia. They're plucking all these great companies here in the Seattle area, but Boeing's not one of them. But Boeing's not one of them.

Jay Johnson:

Well, it's interesting as soon as you said that sort of triangle of leadership I really thought of, like Maslow's needs hierarchy, right, and that base level, that structural level of we need to have our physiological needs before we move into the next level of safety and then the next level of belonging, etc. So from that base level, that self-leadership, I can see that being the structure because that's going to influence how you show up at every other level of that triangle. So I really like that. So so, gary, when we're thinking about self-leadership and and let's use the world of high performance athletes right now, what are some of the big things that you look at as sort of gaps? Where do, where do some of the you know?

Jay Johnson:

Because, obviously in you're working with high performance athletes and I want to think about it this way they've gotten to where they've gotten there. Obviously, a lot of their behaviors, a lot of their leadership has gotten them this far, and that can be raw talent, that can be motivation, that can be willpower. They've gotten to this space. So, in their minds at least, the way that the brain works is generally well. If it's worked for me before, I want to do it again. So now we're we're taking them to a new level, like you said, hitting the gas and moving them even beyond what they can imagine. How do we identify the gaps? And then also, how do we coach to that brain going hey, this is this is actually, this is next level. This is how you get to that next level.

Gary Chupik:

Yeah, it's a really great question because a lot of players don't understand the power of domain management. So, you're right, they'll. They'll reach the peak of their physical ability and they have a lot of talent and they develop their skill. And there's something I call the ideal athlete. There's 12 different categories there's probably more, but those are probably the big ones and what we're looking for is gaps. And so actually, I created a mental performance assessment that I can share with your listeners later and give them a discount code. But I'm trying to find not just what you're good at and what you're bad at, but I'm really focused on the gaps. And so let's say, you're 70% good at self-confidence. Well, you have a 30% gap. There's a lot of gain here to be embraced, and so if you'll just sort of focus on the gaps, you're going to be a lot better off. So I think a lot of the for professional athletes. I think you know over are the days where you could be just excellent at one thing, but a train wreck and all the other things, all the different domains of your life, are really important. So, for example, when we see an athlete really struggling on the surface of the or the playing surface, we can sort of take a guess that they're struggling in all the different domains of their life, or specific domains of their life, for example, their marriage. There's no other relationship in that athlete's life that is going to promote or help their performance or hurt their performance more than their spouse, and so helping them focus on the different domains of their life is incredibly important. So I like to think of, like finding these hidden reservoirs of performance, and a marriage relationship or significant other relationship could be one of those, those, those reservoirs or treasures of performance. So sometimes you got to go searching for it. Other times it's just the mindset, like, for example, pete Carroll, coach of the Seahawks and apparently now coach of the Raiders. He said to me one time that Gary, the best always want to get better. They don't stop and they're always looking for a competitive edge. And we tend to think that you have to be sick to want to get better or this person needs coaching because they're not doing very well. Well, there's certainly times where I can help an athlete that's not doing very well. I can help them. But, man, is it ever fun to take someone who's just all gas and like how do I be better, how do I do this? How do I do that?

Gary Chupik:

One of my favorite stories to share is about a guy who was a businessman in Las Vegas and we were sitting down our second coaching session ever and we were in his office and we were about 10 minutes into a coaching session and he said, hey, can we just stop for a second and can you leave my office please? And I was. I was like I don't know why, what's going on? Like I didn't know if I said anything to offend him or what. So I went out glass wall, sit outside in the lobby and about 10 or 15 minutes he waves me and after he's on the phone and on his computer and I walked back in and he says, gary, you just made me $1.2 million. And he said, at $100,000, you're a good deal. And I was just like what Are you kidding me? Like what did you do?

Gary Chupik:

And this guy was so interested in inspired action it's not just action, it's inspired action. And so he took that inspired action in that moment and he was like he couldn't wait for the session to be over, he just acted right away. And those are the kind of athletes you love to work with, because, like even Russell Wilson would talk to Trevor Mo help. Well, of course not. Russell just wanted to stay sharp, and so I think one of the misconceptions of coaching is that you have to be sick to, you know, to want to, to get better, and it's just not the truth.

Jay Johnson:

And let me dig in on that, because there's and this is what I have found in my corporate executives CEO type coaching and and even down the line, if I am assigned somebody who's underperforming as their coach. So if an organization reaches out and says, hey, this person's really underperforming, we think they're better, we want them to get better, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Versus if that person is, either that person could be underperforming or that person could be high performance. If they individually come to me because they want to get better, that's a big, big difference. So you know, I and I guarantee the coaches or the trainers or anybody else have experienced this where, hey, we need you to go fix this problem, or hey, this. Where, hey, we need you to go fix this problem, or hey, we want you to go accelerate this advantage. And we rarely, at least in the corporate world, rarely get the go accelerate this advantage.

Jay Johnson:

So talk to me, gary, because you said you've done both sides, you've helped the athletes that are maybe underperforming or you've been assigned. Or somebody said, hey, you got to go get coaching because you're sucking right now, versus you've worked with those athletes that are like Gary, I'm at the top of my game, but the top can get bigger. How do you approach those two different mediums? Because it's it's in. In my experience it's completely different. It's a completely different game.

Gary Chupik:

Yeah, very much so. Yeah, the people who want to get better, you can just give them crumbs and they'll just gobble them up and they will like, magnify, and you know, there's an exponential sense of their growth when they take something that they really like and they just go for it, versus someone maybe with a fixed mindset, maybe someone who you know, like you said, versus someone maybe with a fixed mindset, maybe someone who you know, like you said, sort of the coaching is being forced on them somehow. That's, I think that's where your, my skill really comes through is how do we motivate someone who's not motivated or inspire someone who's not inspired, and and that's that's quite a challenge. And what I find is it's really interesting. And what I find is, you know Simon Sinek. He wrote a book called you know Start With why, but I think there's a step that he's missing. And again, this is a Pete Carroll quote, so I can't claim it as my own, but he said you know, start with why, but finish with who, or end with who, and somehow we've got to be able to touch the head and the heart. So the head is your clarity, the heart is your conviction, and so the people who are really inspired and already going for it. They've made the electrical connection between their head and their heart, but somehow that underperforming employee or athlete hasn't made the connection between head and heart, and I feel like that's one of the areas that we can tap into, is like there's not enough clarity for them, and so feel like that's one of the areas that we can tap into, is like there's not enough clarity for them, and so, because there's not enough clarity, they can procrastinate, because procrastination is not the problem. Procrastination is a symptom, symptom of the problem. Agreed, so for me it's like okay, well, so either they're not clear about something or they don't have enough conviction about something, but oftentimes the who is their conviction, like that's where their passion is.

Gary Chupik:

So, for example, I was working with a player in the NFL and he was saying Gary, just make me two tenths of a second faster. Can you make me two tenths of a second faster? I've done all the kinetic training I can do, but what about my mind? I haven't tapped into that yet and I said well, what would two tenths of a second do for you? Well, that would make give me more tackles and more sacks and more hurries. And what would that do for you? Well, that would put me in the pro bowl. And what would that do for you? Well, that would, you know, get me my next big contract.

Gary Chupik:

And I finally I said, well, what a little bit of a treasure hunt for some people that maybe that are underperforming. It's like, well, how do I, how do I tap into something that actually sort of lights their fire a little bit? And and sometimes that's a challenge, and sometimes there are people that are pretty stone cold about that and there are other people who are who you can sort of reach and sort of crack open that shell a little bit and you can find that. So sometimes it's a matter of yeah, I like to think of myself as a cocoon cutter. You know, like in Lord of the Rings, when Samwise is looking for Frodo and he finds him, and he sort of opens that cocoon to find out that Frodo, he's living, but he's not really alive, and I think a lot of people are living but they're not alive.

Jay Johnson:

Well, and I like what you said there because I think about it in terms of, you know, adding the who at the end of why. Because a lot of people, even when you're developing, like, an organizational mission, vision or whatever else, or establishing organizational purpose, they'll talk about the why but they don't talk about the who and how it impacts not only the individual that's working there, but the end user or the person that's benefiting from the service or so on and so forth, and that human factor, that humanization of it, can really be motivating. We do way more for other people, especially if we like those other people, than sometimes we do for ourselves. You know, somebody else goes to their doctor's appointment, but make time for ourselves, absolutely yeah.

Gary Chupik:

Yeah, well, I got it. I have a really powerful story. That that just a really short one. I was going to work with the president of the Houston Texans of the NFL and we had been talking and his name is Jamie Roots and Jamie, we've been talking, so I do something called the game plan for life, which is how to live a high performance lifestyle, and I have a playbook for the mind. You know, that is sort of common sense, that's my mental performance stuff. But Jamie was going to take the high performance lifestyle piece and so he was flying me out to Houston three months before, two months before, one month before we were all we were talking and we were connecting on voicemail and phone calls and text messages. And you know, then it was three weeks, two weeks and one week, and for some reason he wasn't returning my text messages or phone calls. A week before we were going to work together, and so I kept on trying to connect with him and eventually I called his executive assistant and she said you didn't hear and I said no, and and she had said that Jamie had taken his own, and I said no, and she had said that Jamie had taken his own life. And I thought to myself I mean, it really affected me. I mean I do a business, just like yourself, and we help people become their very best and whatever.

Gary Chupik:

But sometimes this stuff is a matter of life and death. And you would think, you know, you're CEO of the year, you're the president of an NFL franchise, you know there's nowhere really higher to go, in some senses, in the sports world, and you could have everything. And I don't know all the reasons why he took his life, but I did talk to the family a little bit. But in the end you just never know how someone's doing. You never know. And so I think when we talk about coaching or we talk about wellness or we talk about mental health or mental performance, this stuff really is life and death. And until that hits you and I really deeply, until we realize how serious it is that we do, man, maybe we kind of like view this as not so serious, or maybe this is, you know, maybe this is sort of an add-on, or maybe this is sort of just like helping somebody tweak their ability. No, no, no, some of this stuff is life and death and we need to take it seriously every time.

Jay Johnson:

Well, thank you for sharing that story and that's absolutely tragic, but it does demonstrate, you know, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether you are perceived as successful or perceived as a high profile, perceived as having a perfect life or anything else like that. We really don't always know what's going on inside of somebody else's brain, their feelings, their emotions, and you know I love that the work that you're doing is not the holistic aspect. That's something that I think is so important and it's something that I want.

Jay Johnson:

If you're listening to this podcast and you're a trainer and maybe you're a leadership trainer, maybe you're a communications trainer, maybe you are a conflict mediator, whatever it is be thinking about that sort of holistic strategy, like it's not just about conflict in the workplace. That person probably has some underlying issues, challenges, maybe burnout, maybe emotional traumas at home or whatever else that's feeding it. So I want to hear from you on this, gary, because one of the things that we've heard is the concepts of work-life balance, and then we hear it as work-life integration, and then we hear it as well there is no such thing as work-life balance, because you know, you can't just compartmentalize every aspect of the individual human experience into these little neat boxes. I'd love to hear your kind of perspective on that, because I do know that. You know every third article is talking about how to create work-life balance and work-life happiness, and so on and so forth. What are your thoughts on that?

Gary Chupik:

Yeah, that's actually a complicated question to answer, in my view, because there's like one of the distinctions that it makes me think of is like there are some people who like to spend the eight hours of their day investing in what's very, very meaningful to them, and then in the evenings, in their time away, that's when they feel like they come alive and do some of the things that make them happy. There are other people who don't mind eight hours of the day working in a factory and tying shoelaces I mean, they don't mind the mundane and then they enjoy the evening. Or it's the other way around, right? They want to just feel passionate about what they do all day long and then in the evening, just kind of relax and do nothing. So it kind of depends on your wiring a little bit, and so when we talk about work-life balance, there are so many people all over the map that that you know that's really important to them, that work-life balance will.

Gary Chupik:

Yeah, in some respects it depends how you, what kind of a person you are.

Gary Chupik:

I, on the other hand, I like to find meaning in my work during the day, and so I don't, I don't, I don't do work-life balance very well, like I just think it's all fun and it's all enjoyable and and I so I don't mind working until six or 7 PM or waking up at 345 in the morning, like I usually do I just really really enjoy that a lot, you know, and so I don't know.

Gary Chupik:

I think the whole, the whole thing is a little bit overrated and blown out of proportion. But I think tapping into how you're wired and your identity is far more important. So if you really enjoy working hard and of course we just know that there are seasons throughout the year where we're going to work hard, but I always say what goes up must come down it's like a ball in gravity. If you're going to expend a lot of energy for a while, you're going to have to figure out ways. In sort of an oscillating kind of way, you're going to have to figure out how to sort of come down for that. Even if you feel like you're pretty good, like you've got a lot of energy, you still need to find ways to replenish that type of energy. So so yeah, I just think it's a difficult question to answer and it probably depends more on people's sense of identity and what they do and what they get energy from than just sort of a blanket statement for everyone.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, I love that. You know, for me I'm very fortunate because I'm in the same boat. I can work 16 hours a day and it doesn't feel like work. I love what I'm doing because I'm either researching, learning, interacting, looking at behavior and all that fun stuff. So for me it's just super easy.

Jay Johnson:

But I think for me it has always been. I'm confident that I could make money anywhere. I could go and work in a company, I could go be a CEO somewhere else. But it has always been less about the money for me than it is the enjoyable experience and trying to find mastery. So being self-aware in that regard I think has helped. So you know, when I think about like work-life integration, my life and my work is very integrated. When I'm working, I'm happy. When I'm off of work, I'm also happy. So it's like you know. So I'm very fortunate in that. But I really like what you said about the wiring aspect, because there are some people who say, no, I don't love work, but I go to work for five you know my eight hours a day to get the paycheck that affords me the opportunity to do X, y and Z and if you're happy and satisfied doing that, by all means.

Gary Chupik:

but yeah, yeah, agreed, you know one of the things that I need to circle back on is you were talking about like, essentially like what is at the core, and I talked about self leadership. But if you take the next concentric circle, so if that's at the center, if that's the bullseye, the next concentric circle is developing the disciplines and habits. And a lot of people sort of viscerally react to the word habit, and it's either like you love it or you don't, or even the word discipline you love it or you don't. But in those cases where people struggle with that word, I just like to use the word rhythms, like what are the rhythms that always put you in the best position to succeed? And if you can invest in those rhythms and have those rhythms in your life, then you're probably going to be in a much better position to be able to succeed. Because in the sports world we say, listen, you can throw the perfect pitch and it get hit for a home run, right. So you can never control an outcome, but you can always put yourself in the best position to succeed. And so what are the rhythms or disciplines or habits that you can invest in in your life that puts you in the best position to succeed, that you can invest in in your life. That puts you in the best position to succeed. And I think if you just invest in those you can have a sort of an optimistic view of life.

Gary Chupik:

I'm not much into positivity. I have sort of a little bit of an ax to grind with positivity. But optimism is a far better response than positivity and optimism. And for this reason optimism always requires a reason for you to be optimistic. Positivity you don't need a reason to be positive, you can just sort of feel it or be it. But even that wanes kind of like motivation. But if somebody says that they're optimistic, I can always ask well, what reasons do you have to be optimistic? And if you can give yourself reasons to be optimistic that you can be successful doing something, as you mentioned, like you could go be a CEO in another company or you could, you know, be in charge of this or start your own business or work in this industry, why? Because you've sort of built up this track record and convince yourself with proof and with evidence that you can do something. So you've given yourself a reason to be optimistic that you can do things. So I'll take an optimistic athlete over a positive athlete seven days out of the week.

Jay Johnson:

It seems like that also goes a little bit back to what you had talked about earlier in the self-confidence realm, and what level of self-confidence is If I believe I can, then I can, and if I believe I can't, then I'm also right. So it becomes one of those. And that's not even to say that there's not naivety out there, because there are some people and and you know, one of the things that I've done a lot of work in is youth hockey, um, and in youth hockey, at certain ages, every parent and every kid thinks that they're going to the nhl and realistically, statistically speaking, none of them are going to the nhl, um, you know. But with that being said, there is that optimistic hope that does drive some form of positive behavior in some way, shape or form.

Jay Johnson:

I do think it's important to be realistic and self-confident. How do you balance that, gary? How would you help an athlete? You know, if the athlete comes to you and says I don't want to get 0.2 extra seconds, give me two extra seconds off the line, and you know it's just like I don't think that's going to happen. How do you balance that space of giving somebody that optimistic, goal, focused hope of achieving what they want to achieve, but then also tempering that just a little bit to say is that really? Is that really feasible, is that possible?

Gary Chupik:

Yeah, funny. You should mention that. I do have a hockey athlete in Canada that I'm working with right now, a junior hockey player who was on the fourth line, even though he's a first line talent. He has the ability to do that, and so he got demoted to the fourth line, to the third line, to the second line, to the first line, and then leading his team in in scoring in the playoffs was exceptionally rewarding for me working with him, however, so there's something called the illusion of choice, and the illusion of choice is what a lot of athletes have about. You know. You talk about sort of like, maybe an over exaggeration or an idealistic distortion of how good that hockey player is, and and.

Gary Chupik:

So one of the things I'd like to talk about is the illusion of choice. So, listen, I don't know if you guys have cheesecake factories where you are, but have you ever seen that menu? It's huge, right? There's so many choices on that menu. So I say, listen, if you want to be average, you've got lots of choices on that menu, literally hundreds. If you want to be really good at nutrition, you have a lot fewer choices. If you wanted to be an elite, outstanding, excellent eater, you don't have any choice. There's only a couple choices that you have on that menu, and so I call it the illusion of choice, because what we have are players who have an outcome in their mind, but their actions and their behaviors and their rhythms and their habits and their disciplines don't match the outcome that they're looking for.

Gary Chupik:

And so, yeah, yeah, if you want to be average, you've got lots of choices, but if you want to be elite, you don't have many choices. And so what if your disciplines, habits and behaviors matched the ambition that you have? And that's where you really need to start. And so I remember working with another Canadian athlete here recently who was a long-distance runner, and he was running a race and he finished in 13th out of a hundred, which, and he was an underage, and I was like well, that's pretty impressive, you know. But let me just ask you a question In the week before your race, the biggest race of your life that you want to get a scholarship for, you know, on a scale of one to a hundred, because there's a hundred different people racing what place would you have given yourself if there was an eating contest, a nutrition contest? And he said, well, I probably would have finished in like 64th.

Jay Johnson:

Interesting.

Gary Chupik:

And when it comes to your sleep, what place would you have finished? And no, probably about 25th, you know. When it comes to your training and being, you know, like working really hard at that, what place would you? Maybe seventh or eighth? I'm like, okay, so the fact that you finished, you know, 18th or 13th or whatever it was, that's pretty good, because what you're telling me is you prepped for finishing about 35th or 40th, so you should be really proud of yourself that you finished that well. But could you imagine what you could have done had you have trained like you want it to be in top 10? Because you probably would have been in top 10, if you would have trained for it and it fashioned your life in the different domains of your life for that. So, yeah, there's a lot of, especially when it comes to youth hockey. Yeah, there's a lot of aspirations and ambitions, but we have to make sure that our kids are realistic about matching their effort with what they want to see happen.

Jay Johnson:

I want to go back again and highlight the importance of something that you said. You know, when you think about whether you're on a field or whether you're on a team, your performance is modified by a number of things how well you're getting sleep, how well you're eating, how well you're training, how well you're a CEO. And you are looking and this is true. So audience of this, your audiences are only going to be as good at exacting the skills that you're training them to as they are in the rest of their life and they are with building out their own internal routines, rhythms, habits, et cetera. So it's so important, Gary, and I really love the way that you framed that, because I think and I can imagine, you know, that a light bulb would have had to have gone off when you asked that question. If this was a nutrition race, where would you have placed? And that moment, because I guarantee, when he had that giant hamburger and a double fry and a shake a week ago, he probably was like, ah, it's my cheat day.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, right, you know but a cheat day is an option and exactly.

Gary Chupik:

But what's really remarkable too is that, you know, over the course of the last I would say, two or three years, the group of people that I work with has shifted, so primarily it was athletes, and now I would say, like I'm like just being honest about who I work with, 50% now are business owners and 50% athletes, and I think there's a lot of crossover between sports and business. One of the unique things about business people is that they don't play twice a week. They don't play three times a week, even for a professional athlete that plays maybe two or three times a week. There's practices. Businessmen and business people don't get practices. They play five to six to seven days a week and their lack of replenishment to be able to perform at a high level is one of the most crucial things, and we know that sleep. Factually, we know that sleep is the number one performance enhancing drug in the world, and so to get that proper sleep is crucial. We don't, we don't know an athlete in the sports psych world that works better off two hours sleep than seven. We just don't know one.

Gary Chupik:

You know and actually there's been studies done because I love to read research papers there's actual studies done that talk about the difference between, let's say, four-hour sleep and eight-hour sleep, and in every single measurable category, every single one, the eight-hour sleep will outperform the four-hour sleep, every single time. Strength, agility, injury prevention, decision-making, decision-making, emotional regulation, fast twitch muscle movement. I can go on and on, and there's no comparison. And so I remember walking on a football field with a head coach of a pro team and he said how do you know, all things being equal, how do I beat this other team, this playoff game, same record. You know it's going to be a real dog fight. And I told him to sleep better than the other team and he'll win. And he laughed at me and I was. I'm like I don't know why you're laughing. I'm completely serious. If you, if sports and football is a game of you know milliseconds and inches, then yeah, that's probably going to help you win and it'll push your team over the edge to beating the other team. And they did.

Jay Johnson:

I'm so glad that you brought that up. So my background neuroscience, psychology, communication, behavioral science and one of my absolute favorite podcasts to listen to is Andrew Huberman and the Huberman lab, and I loved it the one day that he broke it down. He said listen if you want to, if you want to have a better life, if you want to have a happier life, a more successful life, the first thing that you can do to improve that is get more sleep. The second thing is eat better and the third thing is drink more water. And it's just like if everybody just started with those three things they'd probably have we'd probably have a hell of a lot more productivity and, just you know, interaction and engagement. So I love that.

Jay Johnson:

Uh, gary, when we're looking at, when we're looking at somebody who's stuck, you know and and maybe we do, maybe we push them to say, all right, we're going to get you holistically looking at some of these other aspects of your life and everything else like that, um, what, what?

Jay Johnson:

I have seen and I've seen this both in so I played junior hockey, I was an MMA fighter at one point in time, not professionally in the octagon, but in the local area, et cetera.

Jay Johnson:

So I've always been a high, high, high compete person and whenever I would find myself sort of stuck it would really impact that compete level and for me and this is one of the things that I noticed it would impact it in a way where I was just driven and I would drive myself into exhaustion, into burnout or any anything else, when in reality I probably should have taken a step back and just went to sleep and got myself healthier, so on and so forth. So in working, whether it's in business or anything else, a lot of times when we're feeling stuck, it can either drive us towards motivation or it can completely unmotivate us and drop us towards depression. How do you manage sort of that dichotomy, because obviously people are going to be different. But what happens when you get that sort of performer that just is so driven that they're going to drive themselves into the ground? How do you get them to back away from that sort of internal locus of intention?

Gary Chupik:

Yeah Well, they're committed to something, and we have to figure out what they're committed to. So maybe there's some type of unconscious emotional commitment, or it could be a mental one, we're not quite sure. But that's why we have to do a little bit of the digging. But ultimately, what it ends up in is people get stuck between A and B, between two things that they need to decide. The word decision in Latin means to cut away, and so they're unwilling to make a decision, cut something else away, and so they try and juggle both things, and only to find out that you can't. It'll exhaust you and burn you out, and so I think a lot of people struggle with the indecision, and then they say but they don't necessarily communicate it that way they just sort of say, oh, I feel stuck, or I am stuck, or you know something's not working.

Gary Chupik:

Well, yeah, they probably have a commitment to something that's under the surface, that they haven't communicated or may not be aware of, and our job is to sort of uncover that, so helping bring that to the surface and saying well, what's really going on beneath the surface? What's the stuckness piece? What are the decisions that you're facing in your life that you just haven't chosen to cut away, because there's a cost to everything, and Thomas Sowell said this so well Nothing in life is free, nothing. Everything comes at a cost, and I think the exact wording is everything is a trade-off. I think that's the exact wording he used Everything is a trade-off, so you can choose this, but it means that you're not going to have that and are you okay with that? And so I love that analogy because it sets the expectations really really well.

Gary Chupik:

Like, am I? Am I willing to give up something like a for b, because I mean, I am going to have to give up something and I am going to lose something, and you can grieve that loss and that's okay. That's that's being human. But at the same time, you're going to achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve, and so are you willing to? Are you willing to make that decision to do that? And the truth of the matter is, is that sometimes that's a journey, right, like we.

Gary Chupik:

There's things like, for example, even in my own business, there's some things that I have to give up so that I can achieve something else, and those things are painful because they feel like, well, maybe that's my baby and I've created it, or maybe this is a way of communicating or a way of being or relating to people that I've always loved. But in order for me to go to the next level, I'm going to have to evolve. Not necessarily change, but I'm going to need to evolve a little bit. And how much do I want to evolve? I guess that's the decision that we all need to make and, just like you know, even for me, it's like in my business, just to be raw, it's like, well, you know, who am I going to have to become in order to accomplish this? And sometimes I say no, I don't want to become that, you know, sure, and I have to be able to say, you know, I'm just not willing to go there. You know, it's probably based on my identity is probably not who I want to be.

Jay Johnson:

You know I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull something out of that because I was going to ask a question. You know, when we look at an athlete, when we look at somebody that's a high performer, we often think, gosh, what have they had to sacrifice to get there? And I think you reframed it perfectly just with what you just said is it's not necessarily a sacrifice. I mean it is, but it's a trade-off right. Like I don't have to do this. Sacrifice implies that there's no other option. You know the sacrifice play or anything else.

Jay Johnson:

But I liked how you framed that as a trade-off right. Like, if I choose to put the energy into this, that means I'm choosing not to do something else or put my energy somewhere else, and that's a trade-off, not necessarily a sacrifice. Is there anything else that you would look at to kind of reframe that concept of sacrifice? Because I think a lot of people in the way that our brain, we don't like to lose out, we don't like to miss out on stuff, loss aversion is a cognitive bias that we all have. That's really, really powerful in our decision-making and our behavior. So is it appropriate to really just think of it as a trade-off or is there another way that you would help frame that as well. Is there another?

Gary Chupik:

way that you would help frame that as well. Well, this digs deep into identity and for a lot of people, they live out of their identity and I think when we can do things like what I teach in my sort of my business philosophy in my business, whether it's sports or actual business is I call it identity-based performance. And so if you're going to operate out of your identity, I don't think you can really ever go wrong. If you're going to operate out of your identity because it's going to be more natural to you, it's kind of what I call focused, relaxed energy. You know you're going to be able to do things that maybe seem very, very difficult to other people, but for you it's actually not that hard and so it's congruent. It's congruent Exactly, yeah, yeah. And so I kind of want to trust that. And there's an act of surrender to trusting the way that you've been made. And I think when we can surrender and trust that and say, okay, well, I am what I am and there's other things I wish I was, but I'm not. But then I think a lot of the world can experience you living out of the overflow of who you are, because it affects them in a positive way.

Gary Chupik:

And so, yeah, I mean, just recently, I remember listening to Khabib I don't know if you got you're an MMA guy, right, this guy's 24 and 0, right, khabib, and I mean he's just a beast, no one's even come close, right, habib, and I mean he's just a beast, no one's even come close. He beat Conor McGregor recently as well, and it was just like nothing to him. And I remember him talking about this Mexican MMA fighter coming to Kazakhstan. I think it is, and no, was it Kazakhstan? I can't remember what country he's from, but he was like yeah, you know, normally we don't allow people to come train with us. There's this group of about 20 MMA fighters there. They're all incredible. They have like one loss between like eight of them. It's ridiculous. And so they somehow allowed this one Mexican fighter to come train with them.

Gary Chupik:

And Mexican fighter, after a couple months, was ready to tap out and he was just like I don't know how you guys do this. And he said, well, I'm going to go home for Christmas. And all the guys were just like what? What? You want to go home for Christmas? Like what do you? We don't understand.

Gary Chupik:

Like, no, there's a difference between discipline and sacrifice. There are some players that need discipline. There are some business people who need discipline and need to sort of figure that piece out, and then there are other players who need to learn how to sacrifice. It's that illusion of choice, like I'm going to sacrifice eating everything on the menu for the that, just a couple of things, and and so I don't think one is better than the other. I just think that one of them is the right remedy at the right time, whether it's discipline or sacrifice. And yeah, I think there's all sorts of ways to frame it Like what do you want more? Or you know, I mean there's a lot of different ways to frame it Like what's the trade-off? Are you willing to do the trade-off or not? But I think, ultimately, if we can move and live and decide who we want to be and what we want to do out of our identity, it's probably a more stable, clean burning fuel.

Jay Johnson:

It makes a lot of sense. I mean, even somebody like Charles Dewey talks about. You know, if you want to change your behavior, identify with it. So instead of being somebody I, you know, I want to eat healthy. I am a person who eats healthy. I want to exercise, I am someone who exercises every day, and then that congruence of the behavior really kind of goes. So I think there's a lot of wisdom in what you just said, Gary. This has been an incredible conversation. I'm sure that we could talk for hours here. If the audience wanted to get in touch with you, how might they be able to reach you?

Gary Chupik:

Yeah, well, primarily most of my clients are on Instagram. You know whether they're coaches or business people. So Instagram at Elite Mindset and I'm the guy with the blue dot so you can look for that verified dot. I'm also on LinkedIn and people can Google me and find me all over on Google, but primarily Instagram is probably the number one place.

Jay Johnson:

Gary, this has been an incredibly insightful conversation and I know that the audience, whoever they're coaching, whoever they're training, whoever they're representing in the HR function, they're dealing with mindsets and they're dealing with mindsets that are all over. They're dealing with identity, they're dealing with motivation, they're dealing with discipline, routines, rhythms and all of that. There's so much great ideas, thoughts and tactics that came from this conversation. I just want to say thank you for being here with us on the Talent Forge today.

Gary Chupik:

Yeah, thank you for having me, and if I could give a free gift to your listeners, I would love to do that.

Gary Chupik:

So, I created a mental performance assessment. I think it's the most thorough assessment on the internet. I don't say that lightly. As a salesperson. I actually know that it's the most thorough mental performance assessment on the internet because I studied this stuff and I'm nerd out about that kind of stuff. So it's EliteMindsetAssessmentcom and for your audience I'd love to give a free gift. So if they type in ELITE with all capitals and the number 100, they can take it for free. It's anywhere between a $30 and $150 value and they can take it for free. So EL 100 and and that's. They can figure out where you know where the growth areas in their mindset are and where the areas that are doing really well.

Jay Johnson:

That's incredibly kind, gary, thank you. So, audience, you heard that all caps elite 100, go check it out. We'll make sure that that link is in the show notes so that way you can find it there. We won't put the code in there, so it's only if you're listening. We want to get you out there. But go give it a shot, let's. Let's learn about our. You know I am an assessments person. I've not taken it, but I guarantee you I'm going to check it out, gary. So again, thank you for the kind offer and for being here today.

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Jay Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements

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