Build Mental Toughness & Perform Under Pressure | Dr. Lenny Wiersma

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play and life.
Welcome to Perform.
I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I am a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. Today, I'm speaking with Dr. Lenny Wiersma. Lenny is a director of sports and performance psychology for the Olympic sports teams at the University of California, Berkeley. And today, you're going to learn a number of tactics and tools to help you perform at your best mentally. Lenny does an excellent job of breaking down what we now understand scientifically about confidence and how to better use self-talk. You're also going to learn a lot about visualization. What is it? How does it work? And specifically, exactly what to do to get the most impact out of it. With all that said, I hope you enjoy today's conversation with Dr. Lenny Wiersma. Dr. Lenny Wiersma.

**Lenny Wiersma** (0:47)
Andy.

**Andy Galpin** (0:48)
I actually wanted to start in a place of recency. A few days ago, the whole world watched Alex Honnold climb up a skyscraper. And this hurts my entire soul to say this. But the entire time watching that, I kept thinking, this is obviously fairly easy for him physically. There was some challenges, but that was by far.
And again, this is going to really hurt me saying this.
This is a psychological challenge. Just at the very basic start here, what does psychology, what does the brain, how does this even look when someone is doing something as crazy as Alex climbing up a building like that? Where do we even start to think about this?

**Lenny Wiersma** (1:28)
I've never worked with Alex. Alex is a special person for some people who aren't him, like you and I, to try to even have a sense of what that's like for him is impossible to do. It's a great example of we're all seeing the same things, but we're all seeing very different things and feeling different things. I've worked with athletes who do extreme things, and I have some insight perhaps in maybe what some of that was like for him.
I mean, the first thing my nephews are reaching out, hey, what do you think? Is it going to be like, it's a 10 second delay, is that going to be needed? No. One thing I've learned about extreme sport athletes is that if it's not a 100 percent yes, then it's a 100 percent no.
This is important to understand the risk involved with it, because I think at the heart of doing these things is the concept of the psychology of risk. For all of us, the consequence of what he had is the same. A mistake, him being overconfident, an earthquake, wind, things in his control, things out of our control. For everybody, the consequence is the same. It's sheer death.

**Andy Galpin** (2:38)
Yeah, gone.

**Lenny Wiersma** (2:38)
But the risk is very different, because he's not going to do that. He's not going to go into doing that if he has doubt in his mind about his ability to do it. And actually, I think that's pretty phenomenal to know what it took for him to buy that kind of confidence, to build that kind of confidence over time. I remember when he did Al Cap.
He spent, to my understanding, an entire year doing a stretching routine so that he can do a move with his leg that probably lasts about three seconds. I wish I had something in my life that I'd be willing to dedicate a year for a three second thing. Most humans actually probably have some capability of doing great things, but how many of us are really willing to put that kind of all-in investment in? So those little things, those little details in the way he's approached doing everything probably explains a lot. To me, what I find fascinating is you see all the footage of the people who are inside those windows in that building, and he's standing outside there, no safety net or anything. And just his ability to focus, and part of me was thinking like, why didn't they shut that building down?

**Andy Galpin** (3:48)
I thought the same thing. I was stunned.

**Lenny Wiersma** (3:49)
These people know, there are cell phones in his face to this window, and they're waving in there. Do they know how dangerous that is? They try to distract him, and yet he has probably a super human level of focus to be able to know when he needs to engage and interact and know where he needs to put his focus.
So, when you look at that performance, that was a performance of a lifetime, in my mind.