♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ 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, this 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're at the US Olympic and Paralympic Museum.

Today, I am taking some young people with me to join a session in our Resiliency series to learn about mental resilience.

♪♪ Hunter: 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 going to give us practical advice on the importance of mental resilience.

Let's join the session.

Dr. Roberta Kraus: I'd like to frame this dimension around the concept of mindsets.

Mindsets are beliefs people have about their basic qualities, talents, and personalities.

There's two mindsets I want to suggest to you.

One is called fixed mindset.

People with a fixed mindset are stuck in their ways.

They don't take on challenges.

They avoid pressure situations, and they like to stay within what they believe is their true talent, skills, and abilities.

And then you have growth mindset people.

Growth mindset people seek challenges.

They pursue through setbacks.

They search for feedback, and they love to learn from their experiences, good or bad.

Let me give you an example about a growth mindset.

I spent six months with the women's Olympic field hockey team.

And oftentimes, during a practice session, the team would allow the first hour to be for fans to come and had autograph signing, and then they got to watch the practice.

I watched a little boy go up to a field hockey player and ask her, "How many hours a day do you practice?"

And she said, "We practice six hours a day, six days a week."

He's like, "Whoa!

Why do you practice so much?"

She says, "Well, because we have strength and conditioning, we have film, we have sports psychology, we have nutrition, and we have field workout.

And because of this."

And I made this quote that she said, and here's what she said about this growth mindset.

"I really love what I do and try to be absolutely the best player I can be.

Every day is another chance, another opportunity to grow as an athlete, teammate, human being, and be better than I was yesterday.

And to be totally honest, many times I fail.

Many, many times, I was not better than the day before or the week before or the year before, but I never give up trying.

Besides, I can't imagine doing anything else right now with my life.

I love learning how to grow through competition, whether I'm success or failure.

It's a great way to live life."

That is a growth mindset.

To understand where we come from, in terms of our mindset, we need to look at the brain.

So, I want you to meet B.O.B.

B.O.B stands for Biology of the Brain.

And let me give you an overview of the brain.

Inside your brain, you have about a hundred billion neurons.

We come to the front of the brain, this is the prefrontal cortex.

You have 18% of neurons sits here.

Whether you come from a growth mindset or a fixed mindset, starts within the prefrontal cortex.

People that have a growth mindset, they're thinking about the challenge, "I can learn something from this.

I could become better from this.

I know someone would give me feedback about this."

When they do this, the electric current turns on this right here called the reward center.

And from that reward center, you get the release of dopamine, which is a happy drug, where you're just excited for the experience because you learned something from that.

"I'm a better person because of that."

When you come from a fixed mindset, you do not turn on the reward system, but your front of your brain where thinking takes place, analyzing comes over here, and you turn on the insula.

So, you get to choose how you take in life events.

That is your choice.

And how is it you and I can have the same experience, but you approach it from a growth mindset and somebody approach a fixed mindset?

Inside the brain, when we decide what we do, whether it be from the insula or the reward center, that then determines what goes down our spinal cord, through the amygdala and what we end up doing.

How does this relate to how we handle stress?

To unpack that, I want you to understand that stress and pressure are very different.

We need to understand the differences.

So, let me give you a little snapshot of the history of stress.

A long time ago, when people would go to the doctor and say, "I have a very stressful life," the doctor would typically either prescribe a medication, which can be very appropriate for some people, would tell you to get massages, take up yoga, and then maybe even suggest you have a glass of wine at night.

The problem with that is you're dealing with the symptoms of the stress and not the cause.

So then we fast forward to look at the history of stress, and there was a time where you could take an assessment tool, and it had all these life events listed, like graduating from college, bought a house, lost my parents, moved, bought a car.

It was major life events, and you're asked to check in the last year how many events has occurred in your life.

At the end of that, the assessor would have you count up the checkmarks.

Depending on how many checkmarks you had, it would tell you how stressful a life you are leading.

Well, the problem with that is what's stressful for you might not be stressful for me.

Somebody checked stressful that they just bought a house.

They're worried about whether they can make the mortgage payments.

I checked bought a house, I got happy drug going on.

I got roots, I got security, I'm excited.

The same situation but perceived differently.

When it comes to how we manage stress in our everyday lives, those of us that live in the neuroscience world suggest that you have to look at pressure, stress differently and separate the two.

So, I'm going to ask you a question.

I want you to think of this answer in your mind.

Using a scale of one to ten, ten being all the time, 24/7, high, to one being not at all, rarely, don't know what you mean, what number would you give yourself right now in terms of how stressful of a life are you leading right now?

And here's what we say from the neuroscience world.

Pressure is not in your control.

Pressure is just life events.

It's the environment you live in.

It's out there.

Stress occurs because of what your mind tells your body about the life event.

We all have pressure situations--driving in bad weather.

Now, I've got to take my parents and put them in a senior center home.

My big sister's going away to college, and she's my best friend.

I'm very sad.

Those are just events.

But when you attach negative emotion to the event, that is called stress.

That's the difference between pressure and stress.

And when you do it over and over and over again, with everything about your life, "I'll never pass this test," "I'll never get my driver's license," "I'll never get asked to prom," "I'll never get this job," "We'll never be able to buy a house," the more you do that, where you attach negative emotion over and over again, to life events, that's called rumination.

And do you know where rumination comes from?

It comes from cows.

So, cows go out to a field.

They eat this grass and then they throw up the grass.

That is called cud.

And what does the cow do?

They eat the cud, and they throw that up again, and what do they do?

They eat the cud again.

They do that about a cycle of four to six times before they mosey over to a different pasture of grass.

That's called rumination.

And here's the challenge of rumination as we look at this grid.

When you ruminate, you tend to look at events from the past with regret and your self-talk language is, "I should've," "I should've," "Why didn't this," "Why didn't this?"

And that regret that you have creates some negative emotions that then cause you to have fear about the anxiety, about the future.

"Well, what if this happens?"

"And what if this doesn't happen?"

And when you're in regret about the past or excited about the future, you cannot be in the present moment, as a ruminator.

At the same time, if you go above the line here, and you reflect on the past and you learn from your experiences--if I was gonna do this experience again, what would I do the same?

What would I do differently?

That's just simply reflecting on your past, for what I could learn from that.

And then I use that reflection to then plan for my future.

That puts in your control--that allows you to then stay in the present moment.

So, as performers under pressure, we do want to spend as much time as possible above the line versus below the line.

So, what determines, that's in our control, whether we go down a path of fixed mindset with the insula firing up, or growth mindset.

Now it comes down to your self-talk.

Here's what I want you to know about self-talk.

From the time you go to bed and wake up the next day, you're always talking to you.

You're always evaluating and judging yourself and comparing yourself to other people.

And every, everything that you say to you is recorded up here, the biggest computer in the world as being very true, real to you.

Everything right here in your self-talk is true and real to you.

And that self-talk then builds pictures and images that you have about you.

And no one can talk you out of your pictures.

So, if you say to me, for example, "Roberta, I like how your blue shoes match your Olympic outfit."

Say, "These blue shoes?

You've gotta be kidding me.

I wear a size 12 1/2 men's shoe.

This is double wide.

These aren't cute shoes.

I have boats for feet.

And you know what else?

If you come and look at my closet and see my dress shoes, guess what?

They're all black, black, black, black, black, 'cause that's all I can ever get."

So, even though you pay me a compliment, it doesn't fit with the photo album that I carry around inside my head.

You cannot talk me out of the images I carry about myself.

So, I'm gonna give you a little exercise.

In just a moment, I'm going to have a sentence come up on the screen.

And I'd like you to read this sentence to yourself.

It doesn't make any sense.

Just read it once to yourself.

Roberta: Now this time, I want you to reread the sentence to yourself, and in your mind I want you to count how many times you see the letter F, like in flag, anywhere in the sentence.

Everybody have a number in their mind?

Now I want you to be really, really sure.

This is your self talking to you, and you believe everything you say to you.

So, check one more time and really get clarity on the number that you see.

Roberta: How many of you saw two, but no more than three F's?

Raise those hands nice and tall.

Be proud.

Thank you.

Hunter: I'm not so proud anymore.

Roberta: Four but no more than five F's?

And did anybody see six or more F's?

There are seven F's in this sentence.

How can this be?

You're all looking at the same sentence, but you're seeing it differently.

The trick behind this is when we read the word "of," our brain says "of," but the picture it makes, the self-talk was "of," but the picture it made was O-V. You didn't see the F. One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven.

What happens is when our brain reads the word "of," that's self-talk, "of," but the image it makes the brain is O-V, so we tend to miss the F's.

If we go back to the self-talk model, what you'll notice is you talk to yourself from the time you wake up till you go to bed.

That builds a lot of pictures in your mental photo albums about you that you believe with your heart and soul and no one can talk you out of that, and that then controls the way you perform.

No one should be surprised.

And so the technique that we're looking at here is this idea of monitoring your self-talk.

Because if you come from anxiety and pessimism, you will have a lot of negative self-talk going on in your brain all the time.

"I'll never pass this test."

"I'll never make this team."

"I'll never be able to do this."

And what happens is, is you start having ANTs crawling throughout your whole brain, and ANTs are complaining, moody, very cynical self-talk, 'cause it stands for Automatic Negative Thoughts.

By monitoring your self-talk, you can see when you have ANTs crawling in your brain and you're stuck in a fixed mindset.

It's important that you learn how to blow up and get rid of the ANTs; otherwise, you give them too much power, and that leads us right into our next technique, which is correcting negative statements with "AND" statements.

I want you to think about in your mind what's a statement that you say to yourself with some regularity that's a put-down.

"I'll never get this."

"God, you're so slow."

"Boy, you'll never understand this."

What's a common put-down that you say to you with regularity?

I want you to think about that statement.

And the way you correct it is you use the word "and," A-N-D. You do not use the word "but" because when we use the word "but" in our self-talk, we don't believe what follows.

So use the word "and."

And here's what's critical.

The statement that follows the word "and" has to be something that's proactive, positive, and about your strengths that you believe that is stronger than the negative statement to start with.

And I want to give you some examples of people that have used this technique.

Here's an example of using the "and" statements.

"I feel lonely at home doing all the things I used to do at school with my friends."

By using the word "and," here's how they reversed that.

"I feel lonely at home doing all the things I used to do at school with my friends, and at least I have more time to learn at my own pace."

When you use "and" statements, you can blow up the ANTs or take away their power from you.

I had one very, very humorous Olympian athlete I worked with.

And she had said to me that she wanted to lose a few pounds just to look better in her ceremony clothes.

And she kept it up, and she goes, "Dr. Roberta, here's a challenge.

I'm not having any help losing weight to look better in my ceremony clothes, and could you recommend some books that I could gain some height?"

That leads to our next technique: dominant thought.

Let me give you the definition and then I'll give you a story to this.

Dominant thought definition is this.

The very last thought you put on your mind before you take an action, before you start the presentation, before you take the driving test, before you take the SAT test, before you try out for a team, before you go ahead and meet with the board of a company.

whether that thought on your mind is positive and proactive or negative and reactive, that will directly impact how well or poorly you perform.

Now, this doesn't mean you shouldn't be hard on yourself.

I can promise you, every athlete I work with at every level is hard on themselves.

I expect them to be hard on themselves.

I expect them to say, "I could do this better."

'Cause when you're being hard on yourself, what are you really saying?

You're saying, "I know I can do better.

My body is ready to perform better."

The challenge is, if all you do in all parts of your life is be negative and have a negative thought, then you will get stuck in a very anxiety, performance-driven environment that will not be fun to live in.

Let me give you an example of a story about Clarissa Chun.

So, here's Clarissa Chun, and I actually have a picture of her during her competition days.

So, Clarissa is a American freestyle wrestler.

I started working with her for the London 2012 Olympics.

She was 31 years old when she went to the Olympics.

That's pretty old for wrestling.

Most women at their peak in wrestling are in their mid to maybe late 20s, but not in their 30s.

She wrestled in a weight class of 100 to 115 pounds.

On the day of competition, you must get on a scale and you can't weigh one ounce under 100 or one ounce over 115.

So, here's a 4'11" 31-year-old wrestler that barely weighs 100 pounds.

And she wrestled against all women that were younger, stronger, taller, and faster.

Now, to qualify for the Olympics, you have to first qualify your country.

So she went to Florida in April before the Summer Olympics in 2012.

She competed against four other countries.

The total points that they scored against her was three.

The total points she scored against them was 42.

When she came back and we met together, I said, "Tell me what was your dominant thought that allowed you, who was the smallest, oldest, lightest weight, slowest wrestler, do so well?"

And she said, "I'll be totally honest.

We got out onto the mat, and the officials like to tap to check for sweat spots.

And I looked at those wrestlers, and I did say, 'Oh, my gosh, you're younger, stronger, taller, faster.'

But the very last thought I said--I looked up at them in my own attitude--I said, 'I don't know why you even showed up today.'"

So again, be hard on yourself 'cause that's you setting the bar high for yourself.

And along with that, make sure your last thought is what you want to happen, what is something about your strengths.

And then the next technique is decide to say, "Why not" versus "I wonder if."

I know these are just words, but words, again, create images that drives the way you perform.

You think--that's the front of your brain--and then you feel, and then you take action.

When you use "Why not" language, that creates a whole different pattern in the brain and body than if you say "Wonder if."

People that use "Why not" language tend to have a sense of curiosity, which leads to confidence, but then makes them want to take action.

It's not that they don't have fear.

They have fear, but they're still willing to take action when fear is present 'cause they can't wait to find out.

"I'm gonna learn something about myself."

Whereas when you have the "I wonder if" language, that is driven by fear, and fear will hold us hostage to not try something.

When you have the "Why not" language, you see fear, but you have a different acronym for that word.

You see the word "FEAR" as standing for "False Evidence Appearing Real."

So, when I moved from New Jersey to Colorado, I went to graduate school at a university in Northern Colorado, in Greely, and I was getting a master's in outdoor education.

I have always loved the outdoors.

I loved the backpacking magazines, the sun setting over the mountains, the bonfires you have around the tent.

I loved it.

And I can tell you that on my transcripts, I have an F in rock climbing.

Now, I thought I'd be very good in rock climbing.

I like the colored shoes.

I like the fancy helmets.

I've got long legs.

I thought, "This is gonna be easy-peasy for me."

And we practiced up the library wall, repelling, and we had to go to another 14,000-peak in Colorado called Longs Peak for the final.

Did some hand jams going up, got to the top of the mountain.

Now I'm going to repel down.

And boy, am I gonna look good.

Get those cameras ready.

It wasn't anything like I see in the movies or "National Geographic."

The rope went through my legs, my shoulder went into the rocks, my head banged.

And I got down to the bottom of that mountain, and I totally failed the course.

You know, the reality is, it's not experiences, whether you're a success or a failure that makes us learn.

It's the idea that we can reflect and think about, "What do I want to do the same or differently?"

We have to be able to teach young people that failure is a growth opportunity.

I can stand here right now today, 30 plus years later, and tell you that that F in rock climbing was an incredible confidence builder for me, because I'm 100% confident I never want to rock climb again.

So, in closing, let me say this to you.

You get to choose how you interpret your life events.

You don't always get to choose the life events that happen to you.

And if you want to be happy, you have to look at things from a growth mindset.

People that choose to look at things from a fixed mindset tend to not learn and carry a lot of anxiety.

So, think about your experiences as something to learn about yourself to decide where you want to go in the future.

And for our next Resiliency, we'll be doing Emotional Resiliency.

And until then, make it a great day.

Hunter: I hope you enjoyed our session.

Today, we have learned about fixed and growth mindsets.

♪♪ Hunter: We also learned about the difference between stress and pressure.

♪♪ Hunter: We were introduced to techniques top performers use to build mental resiliency.

We also were introduced to the role of self-talk and self-image.

We have learned new ways to build mental resiliency.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪