Eric Potterat

But this is why I think the better definition is really looking at the tools and techniques that they do to get to that end state.

uh who that's look you're talking to a guy who's extremely biased um you know i've spent a career in this field and and i think so my my two answers to this is i think they can turn it off and on um but i think more importantly this ability is learned

I don't think anyone's come out of the womb with this ability to be mentally tough.

I haven't seen any data to support that, whether it's on the neuropsychological side, psychological side, et cetera.

So I think that these men and women have navigated through years of micro failures and years of coaching, good teachers, parenting, difficult things to kind of hone this ability to leverage these techniques and perform optimally.

Yes and no.

I really like the metaphor of a computer metaphor, as it were.

I mean, this is the software versus hardware.

I think as you just stated, when you think of military, you think athlete, you think of these are physical outliers.

Um, I'm telling you, I have, you know, I haven't been someone who's worked 20 years in the military with incredible physical performers.

And then I spent obviously the second half of my career in professional sport, again, outlier physical specimens, whether they're Olympians or professional, you know, pick your favorite sport.

Um, but at the world-class level, everyone has the same hardware yet.

Everyone isn't performing under pressure very well all the time.

So the best example I have is the Olympics, right?

At the Olympics every year, every country sends their best men and women to perform, pick your favorite event.

And everyone generally has the same physical abilities, right?

And the difference between no medal and a medal

is sometimes hundreds or thousands of a second so they're showing up with the same hardware but this is why back to that metaphor of the computer i think when you look at the best performers who are sustaining excellence over time their ability is is more along the lines of how are they leveraging their software those mental techniques that makes the hardware work that's why i really like that metaphor a lot i mean you and i can have the best computers money can buy

But we're not going to leverage the power of that computer without the updated operating system and applications if it's a smartphone.

So I think with these men and women, they're physically performing well, but it's the software that's making everything work.