♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ female announcer: Welcome to "Becoming Your Personal Best," life lessons from Olympians and Paralympians, a resilient future for youth.

This series is about what families, teachers, coaches, youth leaders, mentors, spiritual leaders, and entire communities need to know about building resiliency for today's youth.

This series brings you experts in education and psychology, linked with inspiring Olympians and Paralympians.

Importantly, the series talks to young people, to hear what they have to say.

This series is practical and uplifting, and it is for all of us, not just those who aspire to the Olympics or Paralympics.

Our host is Hunter Kemper, four-time Olympian in the sport of triathlon and at one time ranked number one in the world.

Hunter not only exemplifies personal and professional resiliency, but he cares deeply about helping youth become their personal best.

Hunter Kemper: We are at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum.

Today, I'm taking some young people with me to join a session in our resiliency series to learn about emotional resilience.

Dr. Roberta Kraus is leading our session.

She's an internationally known sports psychologist who has worked with literally hundreds of Olympians and Paralympians.

Roberta worked with the 2016 gold medal-winning men's and women's wheelchair basketball teams in Rio.

She is gonna give us practical advice on how emotions impact performance and how to build emotional resilience.

Let's join the session.

Roberta Kraus: I wanna make three initial thoughts about emotional resiliency, and I call these BFOs.

That stands for Blinding Flashes of the Obvious.

They kinda just hit you right here.

The first BFO is this: emotions, more than our cognitive processes, do not operate independent with the brain.

And here's what I mean by that.

I'd like you to meet BOB.

BOB stands for biology of the brain.

Inside your brain you have about a hundred billion neurons, and these are all the electrical synapses that release hormones and chemicals that cause the body to tell the brain and body what to do.

In the very back of your brain, back here, this is called the cerebellum.

This is where 80% of those neurons, that electric current, sits in the back of your brain.

This is where automatic pilot sits, motor cortex, movement, confidence.

When you're performing in your sport and you just feel like you could do this forever, you're kinda in this zone.

It's easy, but you're working hard at it.

I'm focused.

I'm in the present moment.

That's the cerebellum in action.

If we go to the very front of your brain, this is called the prefrontal cortex.

This is right here, and you have 18% of your brain power here.

This is the executive section of your brain.

This is where decision making, judging, evaluating, analyzing takes place.

And then, in the middle of your brain right here is the amygdala.

You only have 2% of your electric current there, but this is where your emotions sit.

And since you do your physical action outta here, we say you have a thought that impacts how you feel, that drives how you perform.

You always perform the way you feel.

The second BFO is this: have you ever noticed that it's when you're finding yourself stressed out you get the common cold, you get a sore throat, you get some everyday common illnesses?

And what is it about our brain that has me get sick when I'm stressed out?

Because when stress is released, this amygdala, which is Latin for the word "almond," enlarges in size, and it releases all kinds of cortisol inside your body, which is a stress hormone.

And cortisol is not necessarily a bad thing, because it distributes energy throughout the whole brain.

But when it goes into overdrive, then what happens is the immune system gets robbed of that resource, and so your white blood cell count moves a lot slower through the body, which you need to flush out the bacteria in your body.

The third BFO is this: when the amygdala is over-activated with too much cortisol, it can get in the stuck position.

Most of the time, it reacts with cortisol, it deals with adrenaline, and it flows from neutral to active to neutral to active.

But when there is too much emotional stress in the system, your amygdala will shut down, will actually hold you hostage and prevent you from every kinda motor cortex.

It's like a deer in headlights, and I'm gonna demonstrate that with you.

So, I have a washer here and at the end of the washer is this string, and I'm gonna put my hand right here.

I'm gonna hold this very still between my thumb and index finger.

Now, to start with, I wanna show you how our self-talk impacts our emotions, which then drives our performance.

And what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna talk to this washer and command it to move, and it's going to move.

And I'm gonna get excited and give it a lotta positive emotion.

It's gonna even more.

So, we'll do this for the first round.

Washer, go forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards.

Now, notice my thumb and index finger never move.

Good washer.

Keep going.

Now, go faster, washer.

You are such a good washer.

Now go side by side, left to right, left to right.

Good washer.

Now pick up the speed, washer.

I love you, washer.

Now can you go in a clockwise position?

Washer, come on.

Clockwise.

Clockwise.

Clockwise position.

The reason why I got this to move is because my prefrontal cortex--this is where self-talks sits--commanded the amygdala with positive emotion.

The amygdala lit up, and it caused movement in cerebellum.

But, as I mentioned, when you have activated way too much cortisol, you will get in the stuck position, and the amygdala will hold you hostage.

So now, I'm gonna do the same thing.

This time, I'm gonna just randomly talk about how excited I am about the museum, and while I'm expressing positive emotion I want you to notice how the washer just moves.

And then, I'm gonna talk about driving in hail in Colorado and how scary it can be, and you watch how the washer will stop moving.

The entire time I will never move my thumb or index finger.

I'm so excited about the Olympic/Paralympic Museum.

They have incredible amount of torches from all the past games.

They have equal attention to the Olympic and Paralympic athletes, which made me very, very proud.

I am so glad I live in this town.

Oh, my god.

We're in hail season, and I am so afraid to drive to Denver in the hail because my car could get damaged and there could be a lotta accidents.

That's how the amygdala will hold you hostage.

The challenges with young people a lotta times when they have an emotional outburst, it actually holds them hostage, where they can't focus.

They can't concentrate.

They can't make good decision under pressure.

And usually, as a parent, that says you're running around like your head is chopped off.

There's a variety of techniques you can use to help control the amount of cortisol that goes through your system.

The first technique is get some physical distance from the stress environment.

That seems like an easy one, but the key is that when you leave the physical environment that's causing you negative emotional stress, your brain is forced to pay attention to something else.

And so, you take the dial on stress and turn it down to low.

Now, sometimes, you cannot leave the physical space that's causing you emotional stress, and so we teach athletes techniques of visualization, where they can actually disassociate and leave the emotional physical space mentally and go somewhere else.

And I'll give it to you in example.

I work with biathlon athletes.

These are athletes that get on a pair of cross-country skis, and they usually race through a groomed trail through the woods anywhere from 9 to 12 miles in duration.

During this time, they stop at five different places.

And there's a target 160 feet away, and they take a rifle off their back, and they shoot at that target.

A lot of biathlon athlete talk about how when they get to that first target they are so into the emotions of competition that they just feel like their heart rate is racing.

And it is racing.

Biathlon's resting heart rate is about 40 to 45 beats a minute when they're in shape.

When they get on those skis and they race to that first target, their heart rate is high as 180 beats a minute.

Because they can't leave the physical environment but they know the cortisol stress that's going on is going to have them be less than their best, they will go somewhere else in their mind.

I have a biathlon athlete that writes letters to their grandmother.

I have someone that sees themselves with their family out at their cabin.

I have someone else that's an architect, and he tries to redesign a place of the house on his blueprints.

And I find this a phenomenal technique with young kids, 'cause kids have great imaginations.

And you can train kids to go, quote, "to their happy place" with incredible detail when they're stuck in an emotional situation but they cannot leave that situation.

It just helps the brain pay attention to something else.

The next technique is break emotional pattern by healthy distraction.

If you can engage the prefrontal cortex of your brain-- this is the front of your brain.

If we can engage this, we can move away from the amygdala.

And to engage this--remember, this is the executive part of the brain.

This is where thinking takes place, analyzing, judging, so any activity that requires a lotta detailed thinking while you're doing would be a great distraction.

Sometimes, people like to clean out a junk drawer, put photos together, play a family game, if you will, do something on a tablet in terms of sudoku or Scrabble, but something that's going to invest all of your brain somewhere else.

Then you can trick the emotions to calm down without trying to force it to calm down.

The next technique is effectively dealing with emotional eating.

This is an interesting one.

When we're emotional we tend to crave the wrong kinda food, and that's because people compensate through consumption when they're in emotional state.

And here's the challenge.

When we do emotional eating what's happening is the chemicals in the brain, with too much cortisol, is having you reach for that extra bowl of ice cream, that third or fourth doughnut, and then you get the sugar rush, and then you crash.

And you don't like feeling the crash, so what do you do?

Go eat some more doughnuts, 'cause I wanna get that high back.

And the reality is that chemical reaction in the brain usually only lasts about 10 to 15 minutes.

So, if you could do something with the whole body that's different than the emotional craving, usually the brain will turn that off.

And if you can do something on a physical level--go out for a walk, go shoot basketball hoops, go out in nature--if you can involve the whole body for about 10 to 15 minutes, that chemical response will die down.

And the beauty is when you're being physical with the body, endorphins get released in the brain.

Endorphins are happy drugs.

It makes you feel happy about you without actually taking drugs.

And the next one is integrate ADA language into your problem solving.

So, ADA stands for Acknowledge, Define, Attack.

I'm gonna quickly explain it by the slide here, and then I wanna give you a story about this.

If you want to truly change the way you're feeling you have to take an action, but to get to an action you have to first flush out what is holding you back.

So, the key is you want to acknowledge what are you feeling.

Tell your truth.

You cannot hide from your emotions, because your body is gonna respond with butterflies, sweaty armpits, nervous twitches.

You've gotta go to the bathroom a lot.

I've got a lotta tension.

You can't fool Mother Nature.

And the more you ignore, the bigger the body responds to the emotional outburst, so you acknowledge what are you feeling.

And then, the next key is, is you want to define what are you doing that's creating these feelings?

Get specific about your story 'cause it is your truth.

Once you've done that, you can neutralize your feelings and move to the attack stage, which is actually making a plan of action, but before we can go to action we have to disengage from the emotion.

So, let me play it out to you in a couple stories.

I'd like you to meet Jared.

So, Jared is a 28-year-old Olympian wheelchair basketball player, Paralympian, and I started working with Jared when he was 28 years old.

Jared was born with spina bifida.

He has been a--in a chair his whole life.

He discovered wheelchair basketball at age seven, and I met him when I started working with the men's wheelchair basketball team for the 2016 wheelchair Paralympics.

He went to the University of Alabama, where he was a standout star for wheelchair basketball.

And then, he joined our team for the '16 games, and he was part of the team that won a gold medal at the Paralympics.

While we were in training camp in Colorado Springs, the coaches came to me and said, "Roberta, we need your help with Jared," 'cause Jared would throw up before every game and during the first period, to the point where he'd have to be taken out of the game.

The challenge is when you are a Paralympian and you have what's called a classification number, your number goes from a 1 to usually a 4.5, and that is dictated by how mobile you are in your sport.

So, if I'm an athlete that has a titanium leg and I can sit in a wheelchair and move my body and arms and twist, I'm probably a 4.5 athlete.

But if I'm an athlete that has no body below my waist and I'm strapped into my chair and my mobility is like this, I'm a 1.0.

When you count the points of the 5 athletes on the basketball court, their total classification points can't exceed 14, so you can't stack a team with a bunch of men and women that can do all this.

So, it isn't a matter of just take Jared out, put somebody else in, so the coaches said to me, "We need you to get Jared to stop throwing up."

In two one-hour separate session using acknowledge, define, attack, we not only got Jared to stop throwing up, but he has not thrown up since.

And here's how it played out.

First, we had him checked out by the doctor, because I don't know enough about his birth defect.

Is that affecting why he throws up?

Had him checked out neurologically.

Discovered all negative tests, so we knew it was all stress driven.

It was produced by anxiety, too much cortisol, so Jared and I sat down.

I had him acknowledge to me, "What are you thinking about?

What is driving these feelings?"

And I will not share a lot of his answers because I consider that confidential, but it was performance anxiety.

He was so worked up and nervous about performing his best that his amygdala held him hostage.

So then, I asked him to define--"Tell me what feelings are you having that signals the body, 'It's time to throw up,' 'cause you've been doing this for 21 years."

And he says, "I feel the butterflies in the stomach, and then I rub my belly."

And isn't this what we always do when our tummy hurts?

"Mommy, Mommy, my stomach hurts."

He's been rubbing his belly for 21 years.

Guess what we figured out?

That's how he signaled his body it was time to throw up, 'cause that's what he does every game, in the first period of every game of his life for 21 years.

So, the attack, which is where you put things in your control, was, "What kinda different signal could you send to the body so you wouldn't throw up?"

So, Jared went from rubbing his belly, to then rubbing his forearm, to then rubbing his shoulder, and then he rubbed his beard, and he stopped rubbing altogether.

And now his stomach does not get the signal to throw up.

And he sent me this picture of him.

This is him playing in his first game after he stopped throwing up, and I can tell you this: the game that he played in where he stopped throwing up was amazing.

The whole team fed off his energy.

So, instead of getting into that first period where he said to the coach, "You gotta get me out," he just said, "Coach, I'm okay.

You don't need to take me out."

I learned this technique from my basketball coach in college.

I played basketball at Montclair State in New Jersey, and I was one of the shortest centers to play in the East Coast.

I'm 6'2", I weigh about 185 at my best and most of the women I played against were 6'4", 6'5", 6'6", 200, 235 pounds.

I wear a 12 1/2 shoe.

They wore size 13, 14, 17 shoe.

And we were playing against one of our top competitors who had the best center in the country and as we're warming up for the game my coach is watching me watch this person I need to play against.

And my coach knew me well enough, that I was emotionally hijacking myself from a top performance, and so she called me over.

"Roberta, come here."

And in about ten minutes she shifted me to a different kind of attack, and here's how it played out.

She said to me, "How are you feeling?"

because you perform the way you feel.

I said, "Oh, my god.

I'm scared to death.

I'm a nervous wreck.

I'm so tense.

I've gone to the bathroom, like, six times.

What am I gonna do against that down there?"

Now, imagine if she would've said, "Okay, have a good game."

But she went the next level and said, "You need to define for me what is scared, because what's scared for me might not be scared to somebody else."

"So, I'm scared because, my god, I've got my parents in the stand.

I got my grandparents.

It's just not me in Montclair State today."

"What are you so nervous about?"

"Nervous because I might get hurt.

I'm not gonna be able to have children someday."

I don't know why I said that, but I did say that.

And so, she had me spell out what was driving my feelings, and then by asking me more questions to give me answers she started saying this, "So, what do you recognize about your height and her height?"

I said, "Coach, I'm shorter, okay?

And I'm all upset and shaken."

And she said, "So, what do you know with that related to speed?"

I said, "Well, I'm probably faster."

"So, what does that mean?"

"Well, if I beat her down the court, who cares how big she is?

Oh, yeah, I like it, coach.

Tell me some more."

And now I'm getting all excited.

I'm starting to shake my body.

I said, "Give me some more, coach."

And she says, "Are you gonna shoot over her?"

I said, "No, ma'am."

"What can you do, Roberta?"

I said, "I'll do a head fake," which in basketball you hold the ball here, you go like this with your head, and hopefully that person jumps up in the air.

And then, as they're going down you jump up and shoot over them, 'cause they can't jump back up until they land.

So, I was like, "Oh, good, coach.

What else?

What else?"

And I'm so excited.

And she says, "What about rebounding?"

And in basketball there's a technique where you're supposed to take your behind and put it into the other person's belly when you're going for a rebound.

That way, if you both jump up, they would get called for a foul on your back.

And I said, "I can't box her out, but I'll box out one leg.

Yes, I'll box out the thigh close to the hoop."

Well, I got out for the jump ball and there was a moment when I bent down and I did see her kneecap, and I said, "What size shoe do you wear?"

And she goes two, one.

And for just a moment I almost hijacked myself again, but I put into play what my coach said.

Now, in the spirit of total transparency I will tell you we lost that game, but I had a performance best.

When you do ADA, it typically needs the help somebody else to ask you the questions.

You're pretty much too wrapped up in the emotional aspect, but if you get somebody else to talk you through these steps you put control of your actions back into your performance.

The last technique is create mental keys to stay the course.

Let me define what mental keys are.

Mental keys are pictures, words.

They're short phrases that gives you a very clear image of how you want to perform before you actually perform.

It falls into expectancy theory, that you get what you expect.

And, usually, the crazier, the wilder the picture, the better.

So, let me give you some examples.

I worked with a young swimmer who was in fourth grade, and we worked on some confidence issues.

And in fourth grade, as you know, kids come in all sizes, and we never set any kind of goals about winning events.

It was just about how he would socialize with team members and how he was improving each day in the pool.

And in swimming, you need lots of parent involvement for volunteers.

You never want your parent of your swimmer timing your child in the lane, and somehow on this one day I'm going to watch my athlete compete, with all the confusion, his dad is timing him in his lane.

And I thought, "Oh, my gosh.

I hope the dad remembers to push the stopwatch when he comes back, otherwise it's a disqualification."

Quickly jumps in.

He makes a flip turn.

He's coming back.

Oh, my god.

He might win his first race.

I can't believe it.

He's one of the smallest kids on the block, but he's ahead of everybody.

And about 10 feet from the shallow end he dives underwater.

His dad takes that stopwatch and just throws it down.

He starts screaming.

The kid jumped up, pulled his goggles off, and said, "Look, Dad.

I found a quarter."

So now, this father keeps a 25-cent coin taped to the dashboard of his car, in his kitchen, in his bathroom to remind him to lighten up and let his kid enjoy swimming.

I had a business performer that I worked with, that said to me, "I wanna be a softer leader."

And we talked about what that meant.

I said, "We have to get you a mental key.

What's gonna remind you of all these things you said you want to be on a constant level?"

And the bottom line was he just wanted to be a softer, more approachable leader.

So, he says to me, "People would tell you, Roberta, that I have the interpersonal skills of a brick," so what he did is he put a red brick from his fireplace on top of his desk.

And on top of that he put a roll of Charmin tissue paper, and that sits there, and it's a constant reminder of how he wants to be as a leader.

And I know, for me, as a performer, that I have gravitated towards--don't know why this is, but I've always loved horses growing up.

I've never owned a horse.

I've done horseback riding.

I don't take lessons.

I don't compete, but I love horses.

And so, when I would play in athletic games, it began to feel like I was leaving my flow state of mind and letting my emotions take over.

I would simply slap the side of my leg and say, "Giddyup.

Giddyup."

Now, I looked hilarious to the people in the stands who are watching me, but it actually generated more for me.

So, in closing, I'd like to say this to you.

If you want to change a feeling, you have to take an action.

To do that you've gotta first acknowledge how you're feeling.

When you do that, you disengage from negative reactive thinking, and you open up the rest of your brain to think about proactively, "What kinda positive mindset can I use to handle my life challenges?"

So, till our next session on social resiliency, go out and make it a great day.

Hunter: Today, we learned how emotion operates in our brains and understood the relationship between stress and illness.

We learned some emotional resiliency techniques and how to deal with emotions and performance anxiety.

Finally, we learned how to keep our emotions from hijacking or blocking us.

Emotional resiliency is key to becoming our personal best.

This is practical information people of all ages can use, and adults, in particular, can use this information to help the young people in their lives.

We are glad you joined us.

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