#1 Skill to Peak Performance | Josiah Igono, Erik Averill | Athlete CEO: Peak Performance #50
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Episode Summary
The difference between a good performance and a great performance is the result of how you show up.
Are you at your absolute best? Have you set yourself up for peak performance?
Very few of the mental skills are designed to help us up-regulate. Most of the skills are focused on slowing down, being present, and calming yourself.
But, what if you could wake yourself up, become hyper-focused, and create an edge at the right moment?
Listen in as Josiah Igono, PHD Performance Psychology unlocks the powerful skill of Arousal Regulation.
Episode Highlights:
(01:24): What is Arousal Regulation
(03:46): What is Catastrophe Theory
(04:21): 4 Tactics to upregulate
(08:28): The Danger of Stoicism
(08:55): How to spike your HRV
(09:45): When to use Arousal Regulation
(11:34): What does it mean to be fully human?
(12:27): The importance of individualization
(14:40): Owning your development and performance
Resources
Stay Connected
All Things Performance: Podcast | Courses
Josiah Igono: LinkedIn | Twitter
AWM Capital: IG | LinkedIn | Facebook | AWMCap.com
+ Read the Transcript
Erik Averill (00:13): Welcome back to another episode of Athlete CEO Podcast. I'm your host, Erik Averill, and I am joined by our resident director of Peak Performance, the owner of All Things Performance, Josiah Igono, and we are going to jump right back into our monthly conversation around unlocking your full potential of your human capital. And today we get to dive into a fun conversation about arousal regulation. Kind of seems like an intense word right there, get a little laugh out of you, but for our listeners, what is arousal regulation?
Josiah Igono (00:55): First of all, thanks again for having me. When you started talking about arousal regulation and in terms of the performance context, more specifically with our athletes, athletes always seem to play at a certain level, an optimal level where if you use a number system, so to speak, one being pretty mellow, pretty chill, 10 being like a Dennis Rodman type of guy, you know what I'm saying?
Josiah Igono (01:24): Every player, every athlete typically plays at a certain level. And when you look at arousal regulation, there is a certain level of performance, a certain level of challenge whereby certain athletes up-regulate or down-regulate depending on the situation to help them perform optimally. And so the last thing I'll say about this before we get into our conversation is that the majority of mental skills are designed to help us down-regulate. Another word for that is to calm down, to ease up. Very few of the mental skills are designed to help us up-regulate. Powerful stuff.
Erik Averill (02:08): Yeah, makes a lot of sense what you're saying. I hear so much of the work, breath work, meditation, a lot of times it is how do I bring myself down, whether it's after a game or in an intense situation, how do I bring myself back to a present moment to that calmness? But what you're saying that arousal regulation, the uptake is so important.
Erik Averill (02:33): I think about peaking for a competition or an opportunity. And maybe you're going to get into this, I think one of the unhealthy things that we know, whether it's in the professional world, in the business office or on the athletic field, I think a lot of the ways we're getting there as artificially: caffeine, stimulants, these types of things, because what we're trying to do is saying we have to introduce an external thing to try and get ourselves up.
Erik Averill (03:03): And maybe what you're about to walk us through is the techniques to do that without introducing stimulants, whether those are good or bad, but very interested to hear this because I think it is so many of us want to know, how can I be at my best at a specific moment?
Josiah Igono (03:19): No, you bring up a very powerful point in terms of stimulants and external substances, that's a whole different conversation, but it's a big time business. You know what I'm saying? If I'm not mistaken, I think in the NCAA, they actually have thresholds in terms of how much caffeine can be in your system before and during your competition, no one's testing for them, but that's another subject.
Josiah Igono (03:46): But when you look at like the inverted U theory or catastrophe theory in psychology, you have challenges and you have performance. And when one exceeds the other, you get in trouble. What do I perceive as challenging and how well can I perform at that point? And in catastrophe theory, catastrophe theory says that every athlete when you start going to that peak on that Y and X axis, every athlete has an optimal level and when I pass that I have a crash and/or a catastrophe.
Josiah Igono (04:21): So there are things that you can do as you alluded to mentally to help down-regulate and upregulate. So let's talk about upregulation. That's why we're here today, right? There are some simple things that you can do to upregulate. Now, the majority of players want to hit 705, or when it hits kickoff time or opening tip, their heart rate is going so they don't necessarily need help up-regulating.
Josiah Igono (04:48): But if you're a bullpen pitcher and you're coming in hot like you have no idea you're you're pitching that night, they might've even told you, "Hey dude, you're not pitching today." And all of a sudden that phone's ringing and they're doing this to you. You know what I'm saying? Like all of a sudden it's like, oh my gosh, right?
Josiah Igono (05:03): So one thing that you can do, music. Music is one area that individuals have used throughout the course of time to up-regulate. So you'll hear guys listen to heavy rock, hip hop, whatever it is to help get that heart rate up, that adrenaline going. Music is one, command words is another one, attack, focus, let's go. This is for my hometown. This is for my mom, this for my kids right here, whatever it is that you deem is appropriate to upregulate, command words have been shown to help athletes upregulate.
Josiah Igono (05:43): Another one is cue images. When we were all kids, we all had posters on our wall. And so you see certain imagery and you see it and you're like, yeah, you know what I mean? Some people use highlight videos, they'll watch highlight reels, why does everybody get hype when they watch highlight videos? Why?
Josiah Igono (06:05): No one in the history of mankind has ever watched a highlight video and say, "I hope we get a win tonight." You know what I'm saying? It's like, "Yeah, let's go." It's, upregulation. Another area whereby you can have that on your phone, you can have those on the walls, a lot of the clubhouses' locker rooms have been outfitted with this concept and people don't even realize it, it's upregulation.
Josiah Igono (06:35): You see somebody hitting a home run, you see the emotion, a pitcher when he strikes somebody out, you see somebody putting their hands up for a touchdown, whatever the case may be, cue images are huge. And then the other area, the last area, which is when I share this, a lot of athletes, they start scratching their head and they're like, wait, what? But then they say that makes a lot of sense, a simple warmup.
Josiah Igono (07:03): A simple warmup even during competition helps you to upregulate. You see it all the time. You see quarterbacks on the sideline throwing a ball, you see them on the bike, you see pitchers throwing the medicine ball, doing band work, whatever the case may be jumping up and down. Do you know that simply jumping up and down engages my central nervous system? My spine, my brain, it activates both the left and the right hemispheres of my brain. It gets my heart rate up. Just the simple up and down warmup does wonders for upregulation.
Erik Averill (07:43): The reason I'm laughing is where we're taping this right now is in my office in Phoenix, and I'm pretty sure I'm on the seventh floor. The office underneath me on the sixth floor probably wonders what the heck happens about three or four times a day, because, and this isn't something I learned, and you just explained to me what I was actually doing, I didn't even know why I was doing it, but Brendon Burchard in High Performance Habits, one of the things he says is he's up out of a seat every 15 minutes, and as you're bouncing, close your eyes quick little two minutes, 10 air squats, hold at the bottom, some pushups, hitting yourself, waking yourself up, and that is better than any cup of coffee I've ever had.
Erik Averill (08:28): And so, one of the things that I'm thinking through of conversations being an athlete, or even in the business world, right now, there's such this movement, at least in the business world of like stoicism. And I'm seeing these posts too by athletes. And what I'm hearing differently is maybe a mistake is we don't have to be the same emotion for 24 hours a day, right?
Josiah Igono (08:55): No.
Erik Averill (08:55): And so there's actually these tools and these cues of, what is the appropriate emotional response given what you're trying to achieve? And so this is super helpful of, I think through a conversation I had with a performance coach, Phil Whalen who owns Diesel Fitness in Tampa, he talks a lot about this, spiking your HRV through a cold plunge or some of these types of things. This is really helpful, can you maybe talk about for the athlete that I think of, when are some other times that they maybe need to have the arousal regulation besides competition? Where else would you see, maybe you should do this. Is it in the gym? Where is it appropriate?
Josiah Igono (09:45): First of all, that's a great question. I would say during competition, lows in competition when you're when you're competing with your teammates, I would say through extended bouts of nothingness or just boredom. If you're doing something, if you're reading something, if you're on a long plane ride, long bus ride, immediately when you get off or when it's appropriate, you can do that. Sitting down for extended periods of time, these are all great times to be able to do that.
Josiah Igono (10:20): And like you said, it's better than a cup of coffee. It gets your heart rate going, your lymphatic system is innovated, and there's just all kinds of great benefits for that. And so yeah, upregulation is huge. And to your point about stoicism, stoicism, I think has its place but at the end of the day, we are human beings, we all have emotion and we need to be able to insert and remove emotion when we need to.
Josiah Igono (10:52): And again, this might be another podcast, but when you start talking about focus, there is not one pilot, there is not one surgeon that when they're about to go in and do some work, they're like, "All right guys, let's go." I don't want my surgeon doing that. You know what I mean? If I have to get operated on, I don't want my pilot doing that, you know what I mean? Land the plane, you know what I mean? Just land that thing and we can get hype afterwards, you know what I'm saying? So we need to be able to insert and remove emotion as necessary because we are human beings.
Erik Averill (11:23): But on the flip side too, that fighter pilot, or just pilot in general or surgeon, they're also not asleep at the wheel, right?
Josiah Igono (11:31): No.
Erik Averill (11:34): I think one of the things is being able to understand and recognize that your emotions in and of themselves aren't good or bad, it's just, are they appropriate for the given context? And I know we're going to talk about future things in future podcasts about maybe downregulation and when things are appropriate, but one of the key things that Josiah hit on that I want to make sure for our audience is, we're trying to really press in, what does it mean to be fully human?
Erik Averill (12:04): We talk a lot about the greatest driver of your net worth is this human capital, and one of the biggest issues that we see is fragmentation, it's believing that we are not fully human, that we aren't mind, body and soul, and that's also why you can't approach it with just, "Hey, do these 10 steps and that's for everybody."
Erik Averill (12:27): In previous podcasts, you've talked so much about the importance of starting with the heart before we can get to the head. Can you maybe just speak about that, of the importance of individualization when it comes to figuring out what works for each person when it comes to arousal regulation?
Josiah Igono (12:47): Yeah, at the end of the day, everybody's favorite subject is themselves. And the most important thing that they need is what they want. So I say that not flippantly, but it's the truth. And that speaks to individualization and I think those experts in an industry who pay attention to that are going to succeed because this world is trending towards individualization, and it's not a bad thing, it's an intuitive thing, and it's what people want.
Josiah Igono (13:23): People are smart. We're smarter now than we've ever been before. I'm not trying to dog the big networks, but you have ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, you know what I'm saying? You had the big networks that got fragmented by a thing called the internet, and then you had a thing called Twitter that fragmented it even more.
Josiah Igono (13:45): And so people, they go towards things that they are interested in. I got a chance to sit down several years ago with, I think it was a news producer, and I asked him, I said, "Hey man, what is the trend right now in television?" You know what he told me? He said, "The trend is that everything is going to go All-A-Cart." He goes, "Everybody is going to be able to choose what type of programming they want to watch."
Josiah Igono (14:13): He told me this several years ago, and what are we seeing now? Streaming this, you got all these different versions of Disney, ESPN. How many versions of ESPN do you have? You know what I mean? People can get their Fox News, Fox Sports, they can get ESPN Plus, Hulu, Vudu, Netflix, it's all about individualization, and that approach is universal across the board, even when we're talking about our mental performance.
Erik Averill (14:40): And I think that's a great place to end right there is, one of the things that we talk so much about on this podcast and internally at AWM it's about ownership. It's about owning your wealth, it's about owning your career, it's about owning your development and your performance, and so for the professional athlete, it's building your own front office, and I think that this is what Josiah just hit on. It's the individualization and the customization that we live in a time that you actually have the ability to customize your entire performance plan.
Erik Averill (15:13): And so whether it's arousal regulation or it's command words, or it's what we're going to talk about in future podcast, the good news is it is available to you if you take ownership of your career. And so we appreciate your guys's attention, we hope that this has been valuable for you, and of course, we'd love to hear from you, if you have any questions, you have topics you would love for us to hit on, please head over to athleteceo.com, we'd love to hear from you. And until next time, stay humble, stay hungry and always be a pro.