108 Christian Straka: Elite Performance Through Mindset, Mindfulness, & Visualization

So if you're not paying enough attention to the trail, you might trip. You will step into one of the holes or trip over one of the stones. What is that like losing that as a professional athlete? I was distracted my whole life, but I never noticed that I was distracted.

Being distracted and noticing whether you're distracted, those are two independent skills are required. Is that something that you struggled with or was it just, did you... have a more positive relationship with it. Most of our struggles arise from wanting and not wanting, not from the experience itself. And that not wanting is what creates the suffering.

I lost my sight to a suicide attempt. So all of a sudden, it felt a little bit to me like when I started to coach that I was better at coaching than at playing, actually. 99 .9 % of the body feels totally fine, feels relaxed and pleasant. Nothing's happening.

But their attention is hijacked by that one small spot on their body. And I also wanted to not have such an antagonistic relationship to my thoughts. There's a thought that emerges that puts somebody on a pedestal or judges someone as being worthless. A lot of times these changes are pretty subtle.

So subtle that people don't notice them. I had many injuries since I was pretty young, pretty much since I was 12. I was going through these phases of injury where I couldn't compete at my fullest potential, just physically speaking. This is Christian Straka. How are you? I'm great.

Thank you for having me, Zach. Yeah, I was thinking a lot before this. I tend to do when planning to sit down and talk with someone for a couple hours. I really think mindset and mindfulness have been a big part of a lot of guest stories that have been on here before.

We've had a lot of high performers in different capacities, but I don't think I've ever gotten to talk with someone specifically about the mindset side of things in itself. And I've been very excited to do that. But the other thing that came up with that was that identity has been a big barrier, I think, for a lot of people, especially when they're dealing with big changes in their lives.

A lot of times that's, you know, you see that in the military or people adjusting to big disabilities, like when I lost my sight and stuff like that. But what is that like losing that as a professional athlete? Yeah, you know, I mean, losing your... kind of ability to compete professionally or you know losing certain mental skills while you're maybe still competing it's an interesting perspective because at the end you know you one perspective one can hold is everything is always changing right sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse a lot of times these changes are pretty subtle so subtle that people don't notice them and then the intensity of change the speed of change and the time scale of change sometimes really moves into the direction where it just hits people very hard and you know and they have not noticed until things have changed to such a degree that now everything is different you know you're you're a great example of that but For athletes that stop competing because of an injury or just because they get too old, they can't afford it anymore.

Also change, the change might objectively be not as unpleasant as if one has injury or a life debilitating kind of change. But the similarity is that you are experiencing change and you might have... either an antagonistic relationship to that change or you notice the change, learn to accept the new reality and now kind of have this ability to redirect your attention to things in your life that are now available that haven't been available before or that are available and have been available but you just didn't notice them yet.

yeah for you i mean was that because that's the other thing is like you still got to stay in that world again it's in a different capacity and it's you're getting to it sounds like for you it may have been the well i'm still focusing on what i can do and not necessarily what what is not further it is no longer in reach at least at that level but uh is that something that you struggled with or was it just did you have a more positive relationship with it Yeah, I think so.

In my case, I had many injuries since I was pretty young, pretty much since I was 12. I was going through these. phases of injury where i couldn't compete at you know my fullest potential just physically speaking um and then i got better and then i had another injury and these injuries were mostly not short periods of time like somewhere in the in the one to four week range but they were more like in the you know six to 12 months range or even longer um and once i had my last injury that kind of forced me to stop playing professionally it was really not much different than before so I had a little bit of like a lead in my whole life really while I was competing what it is like to deal with the injury not being sure about it so it wasn't really when I decided to quit after the surgery that didn't help that it kind of hit me with a hammer i was like oh my god i didn't see this coming it was almost more like a little bit inevitable and then i just needed to kind of pull the plug you know i was just very young at that stage i was basically 20 21 and i really didn't know what to do my whole interest only thing i ever did in my whole life was play tennis i like tennis i didn't like school At all.

I didn't. And I didn't have a lot of interest in other sports either. I had like a little bit of an affinity for maybe technology and computers, but like I wasn't an expert and not to the degree where I was like really, you know, want to kind of change my level of interest to a completely different profession.

And then once I started coaching, my... own coach he kind of suggested i should try it and um i had kind of like certain skills that were given to me uh just you know natural talent and certain things that i could do that i never realized because i never had to use them so they came out kind of as a coach I was able to kind of connect with the players that I was coaching.

I was able to explain things from different perspectives without kind of even thinking about it. It was more like a natural occurrence that was happening while I was explaining things. And I was able to simplify complex subjects pretty quickly to the point where the player kind of understood it a little bit faster.

or help them understand things more experientially rather than just understanding it intellectually, knowing what I have to do in my mind, but not really that not connecting to what you actually need to do, what it needs to feel like, where your attention needs to be. And that was a lot of fun.

So all of a sudden, it felt a little bit to me like when I started to coach that I was better at coaching than at playing, actually. Huh. Well, no, I mean, that is that is a totally separate skill, even just trying to actually articulate what it takes to do anything.

You know, I do jujitsu and I've gotten to teach just a tiny bit, like a handful of classes with with that. And it's it is a different freaking skill set trying to to tell someone, you know, OK, this is, you know, you need to get your hips under someone.

OK, well, what does that actually mean? OK, you know how and how to verbalize how you actually need to be moving your body as opposed to conceptually saying. okay you know you're acting on the lever on someone to start exposing the space under their ribs or whatever that's and it seems like that would be harder to do with something like tennis because it is it is less tangible because it is not a contact sport we can physically show someone on their body it seems like there's a lot more finesse with that kind of stuff so that's interesting Yeah, definitely.

Not easy in tennis. That's also why some people understand things, some players just understand things experientially quicker than others because they have this natural ability to perceive what matters. They notice subtleties that other players don't notice. So, for example, how close are you to the ball? while you're making contact.

And the ball is in motion, you are in motion, everything changes, the ball is flying at different speeds and spins and angles. So that is one of the most difficult skills in tennis to develop, and to the highest degree it never changes, is getting in the right position.

And everybody obviously talks about footwork and movement and speed and stamina, and all of those factors obviously are very important. They're not the only ones that are important. It's your ability to perceive accurately where you are in relation to the ball and your ability to pay enough attention to the ball and the opponent so your brain can predict more accurately where the ball is going to end up is a separate skill from how fast you are and how...

coordinated you are and if somebody doesn't naturally have the affinity to notice those details then and these these mental skills aren't trained then they get stuck a lot of times and that happens to a lot of athletes but once you realize you can actually train these skills also but the training there works differently than just repeating movement patterns then you can actually improve your positioning also very much yeah so i mean how do you and it can be outside of tennis too because i'm i'm personal i've never been a tennis player i've been an athlete my whole life but never tennis and so i don't is there i mean you're approaching a problem like that what whatever whether it's in tennis or it's in with you working with runners and trying to teach this awareness to some of the less i guess implied things that they need to be aware of how do you approach that?

I'm assuming it's different with each sport, but is it different for each person? Is this a packaged thing that you're working with? And how do you actually approach that and breaking that down to facilitate that awareness as the teacher? So essentially, first, it's helpful to understand what it is that you should be doing from an attentional perspective.

What are you doing? What are you already doing? And how is that serving you or how is it making things more difficult for you? So once people understand that intellectually what you can do with your attention and how attention supports and is really a requirement for being able to notice any relevant details and how that is connected to your relationship to experiences then you have kind of laid the groundwork for what these skills are how they operate why it's beneficial if these skills improve for you and then you need to make the in specifically, you need to make the transition to, okay, how can you train these skills now that they help improve your performance?

And in order to figure that out, that becomes very individual because two athletes, same level, same sport, same training regimen, they still might be distracted by different things or they might need to work on different things. One might need to pay attention. more to the technical execution of something.

The other one might need to pay more attention to how he is fighting his own fatigue, and they put a little bit less effort in. They're doing the same thing, but their inner experience is very different, therefore their attention gets drawn to different places, and their performance gets affected negatively for very different reasons.

But both of them need to use these same skills, but apply them in different ways. And so with that, is that where then it is your job as you're still coaching them to start your tweaking and nudging them in those directions of where they need to start applying them based on the things that you're noticing in their actual performance after or alongside you having taught them these skills?

Yes. Basically, there's multiple layers. So on the one side, you have a certain degree of coaching that is more intellectually based, cognitive. You understand, you listen, you don't need to think about it. So you're not confused anymore. But only to the degree that it helps you to actually practice.

Just like, you know, a tennis player, you can talk about tennis a lot and it's helpful. But you need to play tennis. It doesn't matter how well you understand playing tennis. If you never practice playing tennis, your tennis is not going to get better. So same with these mental skills.

So one of the things the athletes start doing is they start to develop these skills through exercises in more isolated settings, simplified, where they're able to first get to the point that they know how to use these skills, what they do, how to apply them, when it's not about performance yet so much.

Then the next step is to realize how can they use these skills in order to direct their attention to experiences that actually matter in this very moment. And that is then the bridge for their performance where now they need to learn to start to pay attention to only those things that are relevant in this very moment.

And every moment might switch. So in one moment you might be nervous and your attention gets distracted by the nervousness. In another moment you might be angry. In a third moment... You might be in pain. In a fourth moment, the audience is screaming. So anything can distract your attention.

On the other side, you also need to learn to start to notice where your attention even is. If you can't notice that your attention is in the wrong place in any given moment, then you can't even interfere. You can't redirect your attention to what matters if in that moment you're not realizing that your attention is not on the wrong place.

And those are all separate skills. So one is the ability to hold or direct your attention where you want to and in performance settings where it matters, right? If where you want it and where it matters is not the same, then you need to direct it to where it matters even though you might not want to.

But just because you pay attention to something doesn't mean you're noticing details that matter. So to be very simple, let's say you're watching the ball while playing tennis. So you're paying attention to it. And now you can notice a little bit or a lot and different things. You could notice the color of the ball, but that's not helpful.

It is still the same skill, but you can also notice the location and the trajectory of the ball. That is very helpful. And neither of that is thinking. You're not sub -vocalizing in your head when you're watching the ball and noticing where it is. The added commentary in your head might or might not be there.

But obviously in tennis, if there's too much sub -vocalization in your head, that's not beneficial because the thinking, the auditory thinking part of the mind is much, much slower and way too slow compared to your ability to perceive. yeah because then you're applying almost conscious thought to it as opposed to just letting it be reactive yeah conscious or unconscious thought in either case it's not you know what you need in that moment and as you're directing this or trying to facilitate that actual connection right because i'm sure i'm sure with some people that this probably the the progress in these realms probably happens a lot faster than with others just like any other athletic endeavor or any anything that someone's learning but is this are you you know in a case like this where it's tennis is it specifically like you'll set up these are drill scenarios where you're you're doing the same thing over and over or is it they might play a I don't even know what the right terminology is, a round where someone scores a point and then you come back in and direct them?

What does that look like? Good question. I mean, it depends very much on what you're working on. I think one issue that people sometimes have is that they work on too many things at the same time. And when you are developing any skill, you really need to be clear, what is it that I'm working on right now?

How do I want that to change? in what direction, in what way. And if you limit your attention to a certain aspect of your performance in any given moment, that means that you are paying less attention to other things, and those other things might get worse for the time being, for that particular exercise.

That is a very important mechanism at play there, because a lot of times people will then notice, oh, this is getting worse and that is getting worse, the whole thing is not working, but no. You're working on one thing. Everything else we now leave to the side. If you are, you know, let's say you are working on being further away from the ball.

But now while you're further away, you are also a little bit tight in your arm and your technique gets a little worse. That's okay. One thing at a time, right? Whether noticing what position you're in. or whether your arm being tight is more relevant or not, that is the decision of the coach.

If they're applying the right methodology and they're teaching things in order, then you're not teaching the things that are too difficult that require other skills before, right? But I mean, that's a different aspect. The point is more, whenever you're working on something, you work on one thing. And wait, what was your question?

i was just no you're good it was i i was kind of curious on how and i i get it might help if i liken this to to my own you know example here because of the the foreign terminology with tennis but so i was asking essentially how as Because we've covered what you're trying to do and teaching them this and how you're getting them to get to the level of perception as opposed to thinking about it and actually processing it and having the words in their head or whatever other function they may have going on that is conscious or unconscious thought as opposed to just processing the information that their body is taking in.

And I was curious how you actually enact that because, you know, in my. The closest example that I can think of based off of what we're talking about right now is my jujitsu gym. It's typically it's common at jujitsu gyms that, you know, that there's a thing that you're working on each week.

Generally, that'll change from class to class and instructor to instructor. But it is the core themes and the core like base techniques that you're working on. You might get different flavors or different approaches to it all week. But a lot of these classes, they'll start. The beginning of the class is a scenario, you know, you're starting in a very specific position with a very specific end goal.

And that is what the two opponents are both working towards. Then we'll see how much of a shit show that is based off of everyone's base knowledge. And then for the rest of the class, whatever the flavor or specific elements that the instructor was going to focus on, we'll work on that throughout the class, specifically those things, drilling those things in, you know, progressive pieces like incremental pieces and then at the end of the class we'll bring it back again to positional training where you're set up in the same scenarios specifically for you to be able to practice those things and where the end goals are set up in such a way that you are pretty constrained into working inside of that box of what we were working on in the class and that's you know separate from full live sparring where you're going until someone gets strangled or submitted but so that you know my example being there to you would be like are you setting up these games essentially for people to start working on noticing those the elements about the ball that are just very fundamental as opposed to the stuff that is essentially distracting them i know that was a very basic example for you to break down for you know noticing the ball but that's kind of what i was getting at yes no so let's take the example of um you know performing a certain movement okay um and let's let's pick a jiu -jitsu example um if i'm not like too far off probably there are certain situations where you need to lift your hips right yep okay um so a lot of times the coach will tell you or you might tell yourself okay i need to get better at lifting my hips so there's the physical aspect of learning to lift your hips you do it technically correct, okay?

And you just repeat a hip lift, okay, of whatever movement is like appropriate in jiu -jitsu. And maybe you're not quite doing it right. So now you're starting to work on lifting your hips a little bit further or you're starting to do it a little bit faster or at a different angle and you might have a little trouble with that, okay?

You repeat it for an hour, two, three days, and now you start to get better at it. Now you're trying to do the same exercise and you're able to do it. You're able to lift your hips in the right way, exactly as you have practiced. Now you are doing a little sparring routine where you are supposed to implement this hip lift.

Now the point is not anymore that you don't know how to lift your hips. Or that you are incapable of doing it. So you know how and you're able to do it physically. But it is not yet so ingrained in your system that you do it automatically. In order for you to do it, you need to pay attention to it.

So now you can move to the point in this exercise where you're sparing with someone. where you need to over and over return your attention back to that part of your body and just notice, have you lifted your hips or not? Not have you done it the right way, the wrong way.

If you do it, if you just pay attention to your hips, right away you notice if they're low or if they're in the right position. The issue now is only you're not noticing, and if you're not noticing your hips are in the wrong position, if you are noticing, automatically your hips will go into the right direction.

It's a little bit like, let's say you're walking on a trail and the trail is tricky with a lot of kind of little holes and stones. You know how to move around the little potholes and step over the stones. You don't need to understand intellectually what you need to do, but you do need...

to notice it. So if you're not paying enough attention to the trail, you might trip. You will step into one of the holes or trip over one of the stones. But when you just pay attention, there's no thought necessary, no intellectual understanding, no analysis. You will notice where the stones or the holes are and you will automatically step.

Your body is able to do it. You have developed the physical skill to step over, to step to the side. So this noticing if it's there or not is not something you just choose to be able to do. It is a skill that you need to train just in the same way you trained your hips, you know, for multiple sessions before until you were able to do it.

Yeah, and so that's why I was curious with you teaching that, you know, if it's something like tennis or running, are you just like... My instructors might put us in those specific scenarios to make it more likely for you to end up in those situations. Are you doing the same thing just like you would drill in any other sport or is this a different approach that you have to take because it is less tangible?

Exactly the same approach. And then there's just this added layer where you don't just put an athlete in a certain situation where they have to perform this. movement pattern or this you know routine but now you can do the same thing and limit your exercise to the aspect of noticing rather than to the physical aspect of it you can do two exercises exactly the same way physically speaking but you can have different intentions And one, your intention is to perform the movement the right way.

And the other one, your intention is to just detect what are you actually doing. Yeah. How much of this in this world, especially working, I mean, I guess it would be at all levels, but especially working at the level of athletes that you've worked with, does that mindfulness and awareness come down to things that are even before the game or before the match?

How much of this work is pregame kind of stuff where that awareness, you're trying to start drawing it into attention as a regular practice coming into a competition? Like the visualizing, that kind of typical sports psychology stuff. Is there any of that? So I would not separate your mind from pregame.

during game, after game, just the same way you can't separate your mind from anything. If you are conscious, then your mind is part of your experience. And that includes pregame routines, that includes the morning off, that includes the night, the sleep, that includes the competition, everything after, how you relate to success and failure.

So limiting... the work when you do mental training to one aspect just in generally i think it's a little bit too limiting but of course you don't want to exclude it either so definitely pre -game routines are crucial but they're not more important than things during competition or during training because if you exclusively let's say or for the most part rely on developing your mind before competition before training and then you just hope for the positive effect or for the skills to show up when it actually matters that doesn't quite work you need to develop these attentional skills in the very situations where you need them so if you know let's say when things get When you're fighting, when you're sparing, and when you experience a certain degree of fatigue because you're just so out of breath that you start to make different choices and you bail out, then you need to learn to develop your attention and change your relationship to fatigue when the fatigue is actually there.

And not just like the hour before the competition when you're not fatigued yet and just you make yourself believe or you do visualization techniques. However, also I do want to mention visualization techniques are incredibly powerful. There's a lot of science of how you doing not just visualization techniques, but also imagining the motor activity of how a movement feels.

actually improves the movement itself. Even there are signs out now that they did this amazing study of, I think it was like around 30 college athletes, football players. They had them in three groups, a group of 10 who was going to the gym. I think it was four weeks, five times a week.

They did a certain leg exercise, five sets and eight reps until full failure. Then they had the second group that did the exact same thing but as mental exercises where the athletes spent the same amount of time as the guys in the gym on the exercise. But they were doing it in their mind.

They were going through the reps at the same pace. And they were imagining what the movement feels like. And they added also every day. An imaginary 10 pounds. They made it heavier every day, which obviously in reality isn't possible. Yeah. And the third group just was the control group and didn't do any mental exercises nor the physical exercises.

And then after four weeks, the study showed that the group that went to the gym increased strength in that muscle group on average by, I think it was 28%. The group that didn't do any mental nor... physical exercises didn't change, didn't improve their strength. And the group that did the mental exercises improved their strength by 23%.

That is so freaking crazy. Yeah. So science is pretty, like, it's really interesting. Yeah, and that almost kind of speaks to maybe how the placebo effect is possible. You know, that our minds are that strong and our belief in a thing and our mental commitment to a thing is that powerful over, I mean, it is driving.

Yeah. I mean, placebo is real and powerful for sure. But to my understanding, this is not placebo. This is you actually doing certain exercises in your mind and that is the effect on your body. It wasn't like about them believing it or not. But there are other studies.

that show more the effects of your belief system there was also a very interesting study I don't know anymore who did it but it was basically they were testing women who were cleaning in hotels they were cleaning the hotel rooms and then they asked all the women if they believed that the activity of cleaning the hotel rooms is a workout or is not a workout for them.

And the group that believed it is a workout, even though they weren't moving more than the people that didn't believe it's a workout or doing it in any other way, physically different, were burning more calories because they were believing that it is a workout than the people that didn't believe it is a workout.

So you can see how that is different from performing mental exercises or your belief system, right? So it gets kind of, you know, there's many different aspects to how you can train your mind with what different techniques have different effects. It's not like you do a breathing technique and it has the same effect as if you're doing this visualization technique that I talked about.

It's very different, you know, and there's an infinite amount of techniques. I just, it is wild how much a belief like that, or even obviously the actually walking through the action in your mind is that capable of shaping reality. I mean, that's, it's weird. And it's, I mean, we still don't really, we don't understand what consciousness or reality are really like, we don't have a grasp on it.

So just, it makes you wonder like, what is that? It's. I don't know. That's a, those are weird shower thoughts to have to go down a rattle that, but I can't remember how, I guess one, what did you end up going to school for? Cause obviously if you're teaching at USC, like I know you went to school for, for something, but also like how.

I guess was that the step prior to all of this was college and then you getting into all of this or were you doing all of this coaching and did you make it to Adidas before doing the schooling and becoming an educator on paper as well? Well, yeah, this actually, so this is very different than psychology or even sports psychology.

This kind of, this training is all based on. ancient practices that have been around long before western psychology by now one there's a lot of evidence out how it's mutually beneficial but how it's also very distinct right and of course there's certain overlap and in when it comes to developing these attentional skills the main And most important aspect of it is for you to develop them for yourself, to train them.

It is all based on experience. It's like being an athlete. If you want to be a good tennis coach, you do need to, and if you want to teach a professional tennis player, you need to be able to play at a very high level. Maybe you don't need to have been number one in the world also, but if you only played, you know, club tennis you won't be able to teach a professional athlete many skills because you have never experienced them you have never learned them you might understand it intellectually but it's not the same you can't relate um it is the same with these mental skills so the way it started for me was not going to school academically but it was going to training camps It was just developing my own mind.

And this is what I wanted to do. I wasn't initially interested in teaching these mental skills at all. I was teaching tennis, but I was the one who wanted to develop these skills because I was the one who felt like they're not as strong as they should be or I would like them to be.

My ability to pay attention to what I wanted was not really as strong as I would like. It was very sporadic, to say the least. Was that while you were competing that you were noticing this? No, once I started coaching. I started noticing it with other athletes and then also retrospectively for myself and then in those moments too.

So it's kind of what I talked about before. I was distracted my whole life quite a bit, but I never noticed that I was distracted. Yeah. So being distracted and noticing whether you're distracted, those are two independent skills that are required. So once I realized that this is something that anybody can develop through mere training, that resulted in a lot of intrinsic motivation.

I wanted to do nothing else. I really, really, really, very badly wanted to be able to pay attention to what I wanted. And I also wanted to not have such an antagonistic relationship to my thoughts. So if I see someone and there's a thought that emerges that puts somebody on a pedestal or judges someone as being worthless, those thoughts arose.

And once I started noticing that these thoughts were arising more frequently, I didn't want those thoughts. And now I realized, wait, there is a way to change that, right? Not just because I believe it or I want it, but through actual training, repetition mechanisms and a systematic approach.

So I started training my mind. That's what I really did. And maybe five years in, I mean, you start to see progress actually pretty early on. Within four to eight weeks, you start to see noticeable differences within yourself. But as the year passed, I know it was just such a big difference to be me, how my mind worked, what my mind was able to do and what it wasn't, and how I understood myself, my mind, what my mind was naturally gifted at, what the mind was struggling with, what belief systems are.

what belief systems i was holding so there kind of became a little bit more malleable i was not i didn't have such a fixed mindset anymore right um and then after um getting to a point where it was quite different with these mental skills then i actually decided Now I want to really learn to teach this.

And that's when I went to UCLA. But that was not a college degree. That is a different department within UCLA. And I did other training courses where you become a mindfulness coach and a mental performance coach. But in all of these courses, you learn to teach. That's what all of these different platforms are for.

but that is different from learning to be able to do it. So that came first, and that never ends. That is still ongoing now, approaching 20 years of developing these skills, and that is an ongoing practice that one integrates into their lives, and these skills are obviously not perfect.

My ability to pay attention to what I want is not perfect. If it would be perfect, that would mean... I could choose to pay attention to the sound behind me for the next three and a half hours without a single dip, and I could do it. And then for 15 hours, I move my attention to the feeling of my toe.

I can't do that. Perfect would be perfect. Perfect is a little bit like... So it's not about can you pay perfect attention forever, but can you improve your attention? And then can you improve your attention in those ways that matter to you, that help you in your life, in your sport, in whatever is challenging for you?

Yeah. So then I went through the training courses and now I'm doing the same. So now I'm not just teaching athletes and people these skills and coach them, but I also teach other teachers to become teachers. Okay. And I'll come back to that because I want to pick back up on that.

But I really, I'm glad we just got into that because I was, especially based off your answer to the initial question on identity. I was like, I need to drill into this more with you. I'm very, I'm curious to hear your perspective on some of these things. And a lot of specifically, so I guess kind of on three fronts here.

I think one, a lot of what you just said sounds very meditative or down a meditative lane, I guess. in the the sense of noticing a thing um and maybe not not literally in the example that you just used of what the perfect you know reaching a perfect state would be but in in the sense of you noticed your antagonistic relationship to the changes that you had going on and also these belief systems that you had and i guess the fact that recognizing them right recognizing that those things are occurring as a skill and then directing your attention around them and how you're processing them as another skill but i with the i'm curious with this antagonistic relationship to change what your thoughts are on you know like how much of that is as you've spent a lot of time obviously thinking about you know different human experiences and trying to make other people more aware of them like how much of that that issue that we as humans have with change is because we is simply because something is different not necessarily because it's good or bad but simply i mean because even big good changes in life like we can create this huge level of stress for us in our daily lives and it seems like Do you think that is simply because we get into our, like our brain is a learning model, right?

We develop our model of the world. And so when that changes, whether it be good or bad, then we become stressed. What do you think about that? And how have you thought about that with your own life and the changes that you've faced? I feel like you have some interesting takes on this.

Yeah, I think one can take many perspectives, you know, when it comes to that. particular subject of unbelief systems and change um one perspective i take a lot um for myself personally when i work with people maybe a little further down the road you know once they have developed these skills to a degree and depending on also what they're interested in you know it might matter to them it might not matter to them at any given point uh on their journey is um the aspect of Desire and aversion.

Most of our struggles on a level arise from wanting and not wanting. Not from the experience itself. It's just there is an experience that is perceived by your system. And now there is aversion. You don't want that experience. And that not wanting is what creates the suffering. Or vice versa, there is wanting something.

You're clinging, or I am clinging, and if I am not getting what I'm clinging to, or I'm afraid I'm going to lose what I have, then that in turn will also create just as much suffering, depending on how much you're clinging to it. So, you know, I think your experience is probably a great example.

I don't know what your relationship is to your blindness, but I could imagine, but please correct me, that when you became blind, there was a lot of aversion towards it, what it means, what you don't have anymore. So there was the blindness in itself, that's one aspect, and that is unpleasant and things change significantly.

But then there is just this other layer of just not wanting it. That in itself creates a lot of suffering within us. And now you are, however many years later, you still cannot see, but your relationship to that experience now, might have changed over the years so even though the the blindness has not changed or maybe it has but like i'm unaware um your relationship to it if it has changed then you are suffering less and if it hasn't changed then you might be suffering just as much yeah and it's interesting i think you honestly you hit the nail on the head even on a deeper level i think that you realized so i actually i lost my sight to a suicide attempt in that So leading up to me shooting myself is, you know, that, that when someone is that depressed and especially when they go the route of suicide, like that is a symptom of true despair.

It is one, the aversion to the thing that you're feeling and then wanting an escape, but not believing that it's possible. Like it is, these are very human nature and just like core human experience dynamics that you're touching on. And it is, I mean, it kind of. Does feel like it can kind of abstract to anything like you're saying I mean if you're trying to break it down to the most fundamental levels and it is So is that you know, it sounds like you were working to and have worked towards and if you were to work to a perfect state How would it change that aversion in that wanting is that what you're aiming for or to have more control over it in this?

And is it meditation that you're doing this with? Yeah, I mean, all of those, like that kind of terminology, I think it's most helpful to create some kind of working definition just for us. So if I say meditation, I just mean some kind of mental training. Many different kinds, many, many different kinds of meditation.

So it's kind of, if I say meditation or if I hear you say meditation, I look at it like you're saying sport. Okay. I really don't know exactly what it is, but it's within a certain category. There are many different kinds of sports. There are many different kinds of effects.

Yeah. But any kind of meditation, generally speaking, is there, or people are interested in it, curious about it, because they are interested in improving their own well -being. And their well -being... might be suboptimal for many, many different reasons. Sometimes it is the external situation itself. It's just so challenging that you can change the external situation and things do get much better.

Sometimes you change your behavior, right? Certain things, like what people... You can take certain supplements. it will have a significant impact on your well -being, for example. So there's many different things that can be done. But what will never change is that things change, like we said at the very beginning.

Things will kind of be more pleasant in your life at some point and they will be unpleasant again. The pleasantness itself might be short -lived or long -lived in certain parts of your life. And most of the time... pleasantness and unpleasantness lives alongside one another and once that is something that people really notice actually and they develop these skills where their attention is not naturally hijacked by anything that's unpleasant and they'll develop this ability to there is something unpleasant but now instead of trying to get rid of it or fight it, I kind of just allow it to be there.

Maybe I become a little curious about it, even like you said, curiosity is like an incredible unlock for many, many things, including learning to change your relationship to unpleasant experiences. It becomes a little bit easier to redirect your attention to experiences that you are having that are pleasant.

So at any given moment... Let's say somebody is sitting and you have an itch. And now people, if they are not allowed to scratch the itch, they might experience actually a significant degree of suffering. But it's nothing. Nothing is happening. It's not dangerous. They're not going to have a wound.

It's most likely going to go away again. And 99 .9 % of the body feels totally fine. feels relaxed and pleasant, right? Nothing is happening. But their attention is hijacked by that one small spot on their body that feels somewhat unpleasant, not even painful. And if they can't alleviate it, they suffer deeply to the degree that they can't help themselves.

So this is... you know a real life example one thing that you develop for mental training is this ability to sit and oh wait there is an itch or something else unpleasant that you know is not harmful to you you're not trying to self -inflict any pain unnecessarily um and now do i have the ability to pay attention to something other in my body while i'm allowing the itch on my body to be there The degree of suffering that I'm experiencing is independent of the intensity of the itch.

The degree of suffering is correlated to the degree of aversion I have towards the itch, not the itch itself. It's interesting. This is all very similar to... I mean, work that my psychologist had me doing after, you know, trying to deal with the things or, or finally address the things that contributed to the suicide attempt where it's, you know, sitting in a quiet space and actually, you know, trying to suss out what's going on.

And when you have these feelings, like, what is it? Okay. What, what is that thing? I don't have, I know I do feel this way, but I'll have to feel this way about that thing. I can notice it and identify it. And then sit with it and then move along and it's very it's i i guess as you're you're sitting down to do this stuff and i mean you're saying so there's different tools for all this but this is just the underlying theme of what you're trying to achieve is very similar parallel i feel like to what i've experienced with that stuff it's and this is is this a daily practice for you that you sit down and do is this maintenance now at this point what does this look like in your life Yeah, it's a daily practice and it's maintenance and you sit down, but you definitely, definitely do not only sit down.

That would be a great mess because your life doesn't consist of sitting down most of the time in isolation and silence. Your life consists of the conversation we're having right now. And then you're working out and you're making food and spending time with a friend and taking a shower and listening to music.

And your mind and these skills that you are developing are not separate from all of these situations of your life. So if you want in your general life, in whatever situations you're in, to... appreciate the things that you experience that are pleasant more to experience more fulfillment you want to learn to use these skills in the way that benefits that if you have unpleasant experiences in your life you need to learn to apply these skills and train these skills in the very situations where you are suffering not just before or after and then hope while you're suffering while there is the itch that now you have no issue with the itch anymore the itch is the opportunity this is like oh now great now the itch is there now i have an opportunity to practice and i come back to what you said it's the interest when you start to become interested in the itch or how the itch affects your mind how it draws your attention how you react to the itch that is a fantastic entry point rather than just going with the head through the wall and trying to power through.

Yeah. I mean, intrinsic motivation and things goes a long way. And I honestly, I think you can develop the intrinsic motivation, even if you don't have it initially, just from, you know, committing yourself to doing a thing. I think that then the experience of the thing, then. leads to the intrinsic motivation with it kind of like it sounds like you got maybe got obsessed with this stuff early on when you started finding it it's uh i don't know it's all these are all i feel we're talking kind of in like related loops of things i think from the curiosity yeah it's very very interesting and for before we move along to some of the teaching stuff and the adidas stuff like what if you had to point the the layman to getting interested in some of these more ancient traditions that you were talking about that kind of brought your awareness to it is there somewhere that you would direct them yes i mean it depends very much on like kind of how you take what interests you know are you more interested in kind of like the a systematic approach to really developing and training these skills or are you more interested in just getting quick tools that kind of help you alleviate certain things quickly or you work want to work more on the root to kind of solve certain foundational issues you know that you might be experiencing there's many many different teachers practitioners Most importantly, any teacher is a practitioner.

It's not separate, right? If they're not a practitioner, then that's something I would maybe be a little cautious of. Is you want to find someone that speaks the language that you intuitively understand. You just can't connect with them. Once you hear them speak or once you read what they have written, you feel like they're speaking to you.

You find that. then you kind of hit a little bit the jackpot. That is your entry point. All of the great teachers of the world, whether they are not alive anymore or still alive, they fundamentally talk about the same principles, but because the mind and its effects are so vast, you have to limit in any given time what you're talking about a very small subset of...

what one could focus on. So therefore, sometimes early on when people listen to different teachers, it sounds like they're talking about completely different things or even contradicting each other. But really they're not. They're just talking on this very wide spectrum about different aspects of how you can develop your mind.

And then on top of that comes... everybody you know has a certain personality and certain levels of interest and you might prioritize certain practices and certain aspects of the mind over others not because it's better or worse it's just that's what you like that's your affinity and if you yourself have that same affinity you like what they're teaching great that doesn't mean that's all there is but it's a fantastic starting point you got to start somewhere you know so Kind of being a little, again, curious, exploring a little bit different teachers.

Either there's some fantastic podcasts out there where people can get introduced to the different teachers. So one is called 10 % Happier with Dan Harris. He talks to a lot of different teachers who have basically dedicated their lives to developing these skills and teaching these skills. Waking Up podcast or platform from Sam Harris is another one that introduces a lot of different teachers and practitioners through media.

So those are two kind of avenues I would recommend if people want to just like learn about different teachers. How do they speak? What do they emphasize? To then maybe, you know, after you've listened to five, six different ones, you can figure out, oh, I like that person.

You know, I like what they talk about. Yeah. What are the, are there any consistently like large hurdles that you face trying to teach this stuff to people? Yes. Okay. But that is, you know, I think rather than a hurdle, and that is one of the teaching principles I apply to myself and to the teaching and that I try to, you know.

explain to people is that there are no real hurdles in the sense that this is an actual issue any hurdle let's say is a wall you can turn into a window so the wall turns into a window of opportunity this new experience as unpleasant as it might be and and is right certain experiences are extremely unpleasant and painful and challenging.

Others are mildly, but you might be suffering just as much or even more because of your aversion towards it. At the same time, always hold something that presents itself as learning, the way you can now develop certain things because of this experience that you could not have developed before.

So you can take something away from it, but not just... intellectually meaning i have this new conceptual understanding and this now changes my life but oh there is um let's say one wall for people is that they don't want to practice at any given moment they intellectually want to practice they make this decision like no i understand the benefits of it now i really want to do this but then on any given day, they don't want to.

So what they kind of intellectually want, what their goal is, and what their desire is in any given moment are not aligned. They do not want kind of emotionally in a moment what they want if they have time to think about it. Yeah, I think I think Confucius once said that everyone wants to be a gangster until it's time to do gangster shit.

I think that is I think he said that very, very perfect for that. Yeah, yes, exactly. So but those are different kind of what you want in one moment is not what you might want in another moment. But that is a window. That's an opportunity to recognize. Oh, so now there's a version that I have.

towards just practicing doing this exercise for 10 minutes now what is that where is that can be a great lesson in itself and already in that moment when you're starting to be again curious about what is it right now that is resulting in the experience of me not wanting this even though intellectually i kind of made the decision to do it where where is that experience is that something that i feel in the body is it something more in my mind can i notice it can i detect and find it or is it just so vague that all i can say is i don't want to and i have no other clue about what not wanting actually consists of do you do you personally have to catch yourself on this you know from getting on the like the hamster wheel of Constantly pulling at this thread and now there's another thing that I could draw more awareness to.

And now here's another, you know, that brings up another thing, which brings up another thing and just takes you down this rabbit hole. Yes, but I think less on an intellectual perspective and more on an experiential kind of level where you just start to detect what you just said.

You start to detect in real time, like the pinball machine of your inner system. How one thought leads to another thought, how that is a visual thought that leads to an auditory thought that leads to a sensation in the body, that sensation I don't like, not liking is actually another sensation in the body, which also comes along with another auditory thought in my mind that results in another thought.

And once you start to see the relationship between your... experiences whether external or internal in real time while they're happening that uh you know points very much to just what you said do you i and i know you just pointed out auditory visual and the actual sensory you know the feelings versus the thoughts and we've talked about that earlier too is that something in your practice that you out because i know you talked about it in sport from the perspective of the time that it takes to process something but is that something in your own practice with the stuff that you think about them differently as you kind of categorize them yeah so the categorizing um is a helpful um division to learn to distinguish between different sense categories so once a thought is not just a thought and like this vague ambiguous something but oh it's a sound this thought is a sound and the sound is loud and it's unpleasant and that sound is triggering a sensation in the body then things become much more tangible experiential You're not just like, you know, living in this illusion in your mind, kind of trying to understand intellectually everything.

Not that that is not a benefit, but it's not the only level that you are trying to perceive things at. So, yes, I'm doing that very much. And that is one main aspect of developing your mind is to notice. to learn to distinguish between experiences, to learn to distinguish between different senses, to learn to detect how different experiences in your sense categories affect one another and how those trigger or ease pleasant or unpleasant sensations or thoughts in the body.

I could see where if someone is an obsessive person, this could almost become all -consuming. you know, if like, uh, in terms of your free time, obviously I'm like, yeah, it's interesting, which again is another thing to then notice. And exactly. Correct. Uh, with, I can ask you questions about that all day, but I want to be able to get into some of this stuff with Adidas.

How did that come about? It came about because I was on a wedding with my wife in Italy. As one does. One of the other wedding guests. And just telling him what I'm doing. Pretty much, you know, not much different from what I'm telling you. And he was working with or for Adidas.

And they developed this like amazing concept. whether we're working with runners globally and applying this holistic approach of how to train the body and just really try to help communities. And the one pillar in this holistic approach was a mindset pillar that they haven't kind of figured out yet.

They haven't really aligned company internally. How should they kind of, what should the mindset pillar actually be? How can they make it tangible and beneficial for? the company, the people that are in these communities and in these programs, that it also aligns with the brand itself. And then when I told him kind of my perspective and what I do, he was like, oh, that's very interesting.

So he asked if I would be interested. I did a presentation in New York for kind of like the leadership team. That's cool. Then we were like off and going. and then i developed the mindset pillar together with exos who is a company here in the us and yeah and then we created the mindset pillar for adidas internally what that meant how you develop mindset what what the definition of mindset is for adidas right not like a just a global definition and then we helped develop training programs for people that worked for adidas that can then help the community members also implement and develop these skills while running well what do you think of that as opposed to working i know you've worked with tennis players and soccer players before you know the highest levels but like how how different was it is this all the same kind of stuff i mean it seems like it is it's all applicable to life in different endeavors yes exactly i mean the similarities are It's the same skills.

The similarity is it's performance -based. But the difference is you need to pay attention to different things while running than while playing tennis or fighting. Yeah. So running is, technically speaking, somewhat simpler, let's say, than jujitsu or tennis. So that's not too complicated. So it goes much more to the level of, oh.

How do you deal with pain and fatigue? How does your desire and diversion affect your decisions? How often do you do the things that you understand that are good for you, even though you don't like them? And how often do you do things that you understand that are not good for you, just because you want them?

And that is obviously different for every individual. Everybody is dealing with different kind of challenges while they're running or while they're performing and training and preparing. So there were a lot of similarities, but then there is a lot of differences. And I worked with a couple of professionals in the running community also, but it was mostly company internal and with community members that are not professional runners.

It was kind of like a small subset, but we touched upon like, I think it was maybe even over like around 200 ,000 runners globally that these programs kind of reached. Which is absolutely wild. That's a lot of people, man. I mean, that is crazy. So I speak to 200 ,000 people.

Yeah. But they consumed, that many people had consumed that content that you guys put out. Yeah. Gosh, I think that that idea of how often do you make yourself do things that you don't want to do? I think that is a very another area that's really under recognized as in terms of its potential to improve just your overall well -being.

And I think you're specifically from the perspective of resilience and just. obviously not being negligent with it, but if you notice a reason, I think people in their daily lives, if you notice something that you don't want to do specifically because it makes you physically uncomfortable to go do it, such a big force multiplier in your life that's really not that hard to implement and just notice when your inner bitch starts talking and then fight back against it.

Cold plunging being a perfect example that I've gotten into that in the past year and a half. And I hate doing that every single day, but I think it is just like health, like being measured and proven health benefits aside. I think just the simple fact of making yourself get in that stupid frozen water every morning is, you know, has, has impacts that are probably as big as if not bigger than, than the.

the brown fat and all the other smaller stuff that comes with it and i think that applies to to really anything physical because it is you're you're having to exhibit some sort of control over your your mind um which really is all of really what you've you're doing which is again we're talking in circles that it's all related and i just i don't know man this has been a very very different conversation i think that i've been able to have on here but i was so So excited to have it and so glad that we've been able to have it.

I mean, it was very clear from your answer to the very first question that you've done a lot of just thinking about things. And I think that's really, really cool and really admirable and something that all of us should be doing more of. I mean, if people want to find you, where should they go?

Yeah, you can, my website really, straka .la. you can find kind of access to, you know, whether it's my LinkedIn or Instagram or just, I have a blog on that website also where you can read quite a lot in great detail about what these skills are and how they work and not just the writing itself, but also I have kind of interactive diagrams and visuals on there where people can, where these concepts are explained in a different way.

um rather than just you know in a narrative so i think that's just definitely something that they can find and then um also you know if people are interested in people that influenced me also on my website you have to search a little bit but there is a part where you can see my influences okay and kind of it goes into that direction so people can dig like if they're interested there's definitely a lot to read and watch and listen to That's awesome.

I mean, I'm going to go poke around on there. I'm kind of curious to see where, dig back into, I guess, your lineage here with some of this stuff too. I'm very, very curious. So is there anything that I didn't ask you about that I should have that you want to mention before we wrap this thing up?

No, no, great. I think this was a lot of fun. Thank you very much for having me. This was really a joy. And yeah. yeah absolutely and thanks everyone at home for listening to another episode of going in blind i don't i need to sit on this one before i have something take away to say so i'm gonna leave it at this and thank you for being here i will see you next time bye