Bob Bowman, ASU Men's and Women's Swimming Head Coach

Bob Bowman (0:00)

At the end of the day, the thing that drives performance, well, at least in swimming, and I would say in every sport, is the coach-athlete partnership.

It's not a system, it's not a supplement, it's not a weight training program. I mean, it is the coach and athlete partnership, and on a daily basis, how that works.

Michael Gervais (0:29)

All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm Michael Gervais by Trade and Training. I'm a sport and performance psychologist. And the whole idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery, those that are dedicated and have dedicated ridiculous amounts of focus and energy and passion towards the nuances of their craft. So what we want to do is see if we can understand what they're searching for. We wanna understand their framework, how they see the world and themselves and make sense of events. And we also wanna understand the mental skills that they've used to build and refine their craft.

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Now, this week's conversation is with Hall of Fame swimming coach, Bob Bowman. And most of you know his name. He's literally the maestro behind the flat out best ever career of Michael Phelps. And he's the head coach for the men's and women's programs at Arizona State University.

Coach Bowman is four time member of the US. Olympic Team staff, including head coach of the men's team at Rio in 2016

And listen to this, he's guided swimmers to 38 Olympic medals.

Yes, Michael Phelps is included in that, but including 21 individual medals and 19 individual gold medals. 43 world records over the course of his incredible career. He understands it.

Either that or he's ridiculous at picking people that are naturally gonna win. And there's always an argument for any of us in the field of performance psychology, for performance development, like did you get lucky with somebody or do you really understand something? The truth is there's probably something in the middle, but to be able to do the length of his career at the quality of his career is notable, it's important and I'm excited to be able to share this conversation with you. He's incredible at his understanding and his clarity and he's also had incredible success likely because of that. And for him, it's all about the process. That's it, it's about the process. When it comes to the process, he's got four phases, a discovery phase, an imagination phase, a challenge phase, and a high performance phase. It's really clean.