Nolan Martin :
Hey everyone! Thanks for joining us on the NEGOTIATEx podcast. We are continuing our conversation with Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Bryan Price, PhD and founder of Top Mental Game, LLC. If you haven’t already checked out part A of the show, be sure to do that first. Let’s jump into the conversation with Bryan.
Bryan Price:
Imagine a negotiation front. And I know you guys are the experts here. Imagine trying to be a professional negotiator by just sitting in an auditorium and having former negotiators come in and tell you how to negotiate. Without ever having the opportunity to kick the tire, you would never go get surgery, like brain surgery from someone.
You say what are your credentials? How many of these have you done? And they say, I haven’t done any, but I listen to podcasts all the time. I’m the way about other brain surgeons on how to do it. And it sounds so comical, It sounds so comical. But that’s how a lot of leadership development at the university level is done. It’s crazy.
NM:
What can we do in organizations and agencies? You see this a lot in the government. People just get moved up to that next manager level, but hasn’t had any experience and really doesn’t know how to lead. But then they continue their career without getting feedback. Without implementing these skills and we just assume that they’re good on leadership. Like, how do you approach an organization to at least have them identify that as a need for addressing it?
Bridging Leadership Development: From Academia To Corporate Realities [01:20]
BP:
It’s really tough. And that’s why I feel like at the university level is the best place to do these sorts of things. Now also go back to look at like the history of leadership development at the corporate level, like for a long period of time, it was only bestowed upon your high performers, and so those were the only individuals that were getting leadership development.
I think companies have seen the light that they need to have more comprehensive programs that reach people at younger levels so that you can give them more tools. What’s funny though, is a lot of companies that I talk to and work with, especially when they’re up and coming companies, right? They always have this mentality of once we make it right, once we become a Fortune 1,000 or Fortune 500, then we’ll invest in leadership development because they don’t think that they’re big enough or more profitable enough or any of those sorts of things.
When I tell them like, no, if you invest in leadership development at an earlier stage, you’re going to become Fortune 500 much faster than you would if you’re going about the way you are. I think the challenge though, when you try to do leadership development at the corporate level is because of the stakes, right? So if someone is not performing as a leader, they will likely get fired. And at the college level, I loved it when my students failed because it was the best teacher, but it was a soft landing, right?
There was my program. I told you it was co-curricular. So we did not have any grades that were given out. It was all about, and only about development. In the aviation world that I come from in the army, there’s this thing called Green Platoons, right? So if you show up to a unit and say, you haven’t been flying for a while, you go to this, one of the flying units is called the Green Platoon, where you get a chance to go fly with an instructor pilot, make all the mistakes that you can, and it doesn’t hurt you until you get your check ride and then you’re now everything’s for keeps, right?
I don’t know what the analogy I don’t think there is a good analog in the corporate world for what a Green Platoon is to help people grow their leadership skills, but interested in y’all’s thoughts on that, too.
Aram Donigian:
I think this idea of the Green Platoon is really interesting, Bryan. I wonder, do organizations, are they taking enough ownership internally over leader development? And is that, would that help if they brought into, whether it’s HR or another side organization, we own it versus we outsource this?
Rethinking Leadership Development: From Ad-Hoc Inspiration To Structured Transformation [03:39]
BP:
Great question. The really big organizations obviously have leadership and development folks. And usually those, the smart organizations have that individual at the C suite level, right? So that it becomes important. But you’re right, a lot of them outsource it. There was just an article the other day, I think it was in Forbes. We’re talking about a multi billion dollar industry. I think it’s almost $80 billion. The leadership development industry, it’s not really effective. I think effective rates, when you poll people about the did you have a good experience in your leadership development program is hovering around 29%.
So that’s not a good return on the investments out there. And part of that though, reason is because of this, how most organizations do it. It’s done via ad hoc motivational speaker series. And I just don’t think that’s a super effective way to do it. I think the key here is, can organizations create development programs and truly development programs, right? Where you can experiment, you can fail and you can learn and iterate without there being the high costs of we’re going to fire this individual if they do fail.
AD:
It seems like it’s a factor, a couple of things. So one is just the time to do that. I think it really does. When you talk about practice, feedback, reflection, these things take time.
No organization has as much time as it needs to get everything done in this busy world. The other thing is metrics. And I think there’s a real trap we fall into. And obviously from the world of military, we know there’s a difference between a measure of performance and a measure of success and thinking about differently, right?
Did you just do it? Or to what degree did you do something? And that’s being able to just bring in a speaker. It allows me to check a block, but it may not result in any tangible improvements.
BP:
It’s obviously a challenge. It’s so what do you measure in that front? And so let me just talk briefly about what we did at the Buccino Institute. And, I’m actually finishing a book on this on how to revolutionize leadership development at the collegiate level. Two things. One is I think the model that can be replicated, looks somewhat similar to the army’s model, but I think we even improved on it. So the army, and when we were first starting out, the army FM on leadership was very simple document called Be, Know, and Do, right?
And it had to be like max of four letters each. So it was Be, Know, and Do, which I think is actually a decent model, but I made some alterations to that when I was at the Buccino Leadership Institute. So the first one is Be, and I love that, right? I think. Leadership isn’t a title, it’s a mindset. And so first and foremost, you have to have your head wrapped around that. It’s no longer about you. It’s about others. I really like the B component. I changed Know, from Know to Learn.
And because when I think of no, it’s almost like dichotomous, right? And oh, I know leadership. Check. That’s never the case. I always talk about leaders are learners. And when you stop learning, you stop leading. Also, learn is like an active verb. You never “get it,” when you’re a leader. Going back to the points we talked earlier about, it’s about people and people change. So guess what? You got to change. So the Do, I love, right? Because for the same reasons we talked earlier about, I used to have a colleague at Seton Hall that said, you don’t learn how to become a great driver, like when you’re learning how to drive a car.
I’m memorizing the driver’s manual. You get, you have to get out and go do it. And I think leadership is the same way. The two additions though, that I made to that Army model. So it’s Be, Learn, Do is reflect where does that feedback, where do you get that feedback of how well you’re doing? And there’s multiple places that we can talk about on where to get that.
And then the last R is Repeat. So I go back to the notion of you never really make it. Okay. You go from a direct line supervisor and now you’re a vice president and Nolan, you talked about this before, when you go up the hierarchy here, I think people all have that imposter syndrome. Guess what? You just go back to Be, right? If you’re a SVP, then you own the fact that you’re an SVP. Now let’s learn, what are your strengths? What are your vulnerabilities? How do you have to navigate here? So that Be, Learn, Do, Reflect, Repeat, can be replicated with other corporations. You mentioned Aram about how you measure this stuff?
And it’s tough, right? I think most colleges and most leadership development programs just pump this one. But what we did was something interesting. We talked about different types of feedback. One of the things we did with our students was we gave them different professional leadership assessments. So we gave every student in their freshman year, the EQI 2.0, which is an emotional intelligence assessment. We also gave students the disc. We gave them strengths finder. In our first year, we did an MBTI, but we stopped using that. This is what we did in terms of like, how do we know our program was successful?
We gave every freshman the EQI 2.0 their freshman year. And guess what we did their senior year. We gave them the EQI 2.0. So we have a longitudinal data of levels of improvement. And so the highest increase. So I did some peer reviewed research to see who other people have done longitudinal before and afters for their leadership development programs at the collegiate level. And I found only two that were decently large size and one was in Australia. The other one was in Canada. The largest increase any of those programs had produced was 2.7 points on this EQI scale.
Our program was at 12.5, so we’re talking. We increased between four and five times increases in emotional intelligence than what those other groups did. Now, some people can say EQI isn’t the right metric, but we were trying to actually put some meat on the bone when it came to, we felt like emotional intelligence was a decent place to start.
NM:
Your team at Top Mental Game comprises individuals with extensive and diverse backgrounds from former high level athletes to military veterans. How do these varied experiences contribute to the effectiveness of your coaching programs? And what unique perspectives do they bring to the table?
Building Top Mental Game: Leveraging High-Pressure Expertise In Leadership [09:14]
BP:
We were joking earlier about, if you look at my website, topmentalgame.com, and you go to our team page, you see a whole lot of aviators on there. And that was certainly not by design for those, the entrepreneurs that are probably chiming in. First off, I never thought that Top Mental game would be what it is today, right? So you craft something, but you don’t know exactly what trajectory it’s going to take. And so I always was no pun intended here, like an army of one when it came to my organization. But the cool part was, is I had people that I really respected.
Reagan Prather, who I’ve known since Aram, she’s Joel Prather’s spouse. If you remember Joel from another class of 98 shout outs, I’ve known them since freshman year of college. And then Chris Kirk was the other individual who’s also our classmate. And he was a former baseball player too. So we were teammates. When I look at those individuals, first off, I’m extremely proud of those people that are on my website because they’re fantastic ambassadors, but what do they bring to the table beyond the fact that they’re aviators and a lot of them are, Chris is a special operations aviator, right? So if my organization is able to help people perform at their best when it matters the most.
Then I wanted to bring on people that have been in hairy situations where they’ve been under pressure. And so it’s an eclectic mix, but those individuals, and they will also tell you just like I will, that I haven’t always performed the way I wanted to in those pressure situations, but those people are able to do that. And so, they’re all former athletes. They’re coaches. They’re fantastic leaders, but they’re also parents, right? And that’s the other component, which is I work with a lot of student athletes. And so I think it’s important to see the pressures that we’re putting on kids from a parent perspective as well.
AD:
I had the chance to see Chris up here at Tuck earlier this year. And so excited to see that you two are working together.
BP:
Does he have to go through the remedial training then?
AD:
That’s not remedial. No, it’s called Tuck Next Step. I’ll talk about transition. It’s a great program for transitioning the veterans and elite athletes. So he was with the best of the best.
BP:
You got my question wrong here. So I’m sure Chris couldn’t pass your course up at Dartmouth at Tuck. So when is his remedial training, like expected to take place.
AD:
He aced it, Bryan. He surprised you. He aced it. Chris is going to enjoy hearing that. Hey, let’s talk a little bit about your program and don’t want you to reveal all the secrets of what you do, but as my understanding is, It’s called the Blueprint. It’s a course that covers essential aspects of mental performance training. There’s a few key components: prepare the mind, perform with confidence, persevere. Can you describe it a little bit and how you apply it, given that you’re working with such a diverse population of people from high school athletes to senior military officials and business leaders and so forth.
Enhancing Athletic Performance Through Mental Preparation & Resilience [11:52]
BP:
And the Blueprint is a component of what we do on the athlete side. That is the online program that we created, but it’s essentially based on the live coaching that we do as well. I think, let me start here. When I compare the pressure on kids today versus the pressure that we had as kids, it’s much different. It’s much more intense.
I don’t know if that’s whether it’s due to FOMO or social media or the status symbols of signing with a college. But the pressures on kids these days from an athletic standpoint far surpassed what we had. On the positive side, the physical improvements to youth sports compared to when I was playing is astronomical, right?
So I have a 15 year old soccer player and when I look at her opportunities, she has the opportunity to play on turf. I never had any opportunities to play on that. So if it rained, you were out. She can play at night. She can play indoors. She can play all year round. She’s got access to elite coaches. We had the neighborhood dad that had afternoon’s off, right? To me, I think there’s been a lot of physical improvements. But with that pressure, what hasn’t kept pace with the physical improvements is the coping skills to help athletes deal with these pressures and so that’s the gap that Top Mental Game kind of moves in and fills for folks.
When it comes to these different components, I feel like there is a preparation piece to mental performance. And so like, how do you view what you’re about to go do. And does your body enter that fight or flight thing? We see this in the Olympics. Like we were talking before about. How do you perform in the moment and how do you bounce back if you do stumble or something is different about your performance, which you were not expecting.
And then the last piece is like, how do you persevere through all of that? And how do you process what just happened in your event so that you can get even better the next time. So our program, we do individual coaching one on one with coaches and athletes. We work with teams. So I’m really pumped this semester.
I’ll be working with Colgate women’s basketball. So I’ve worked with them the past couple of years. And then the last piece is this really cool program that I have is called the Ultimate Mindset group program, which is a hybrid program. I take eight to 10 athletes. I cap it at that. It’s nine total sessions. Six of those are small groups. So it’s us jumping on zoom, but then three of those are one on ones.
And in those one on ones we deep dive, I provide every athlete with a personalized goal plan. I provide athletes with personalized visualization imagery exercises that I record and then send to their phone. I think the signature piece of what we do is a pre-competition routine. I co-create with the athlete, a pre competition routine that again, we work on it together. I record it. And now it’s on your phone. The analogy there is like every athlete, when they go perform is going to warm up physically before they go compete.
What are they doing to warm up? Their most important muscle. And so this is a four to five minute routine that they can do in their car, in the dugout, in the locker room, wherever it is. Yeah. Thanks for allowing me the chance to talk about that program.
AD:
Well, it really aligns with some of the things I think we have seen in the Olympics. Simone Biles talked about, she had a coaching session in the morning of the women’s all-around. Suni Lee talked about the power of journaling for her own mental health and preparation. And I think that when you talk about what resources are available now, right? So certainly stress, pressure, anxiety, all time high for our youth, which is just something we have to be aware of, but at least we’re aware of it and services like what you’re providing.
I think back to when we were at West Point, when you were a college ball player, cutting the center for enhanced performance at West Point was one of those leading services at the time. And just how much has happened now in the last 25 years.
BP:
Yeah, so first off, West Point was way ahead of itself in terms of crafting the Center for Enhanced Performance. And just to, kind of, I got my little egg chair. There it is. There it is. So shout out to CEP. Fantastic opportunity to work alongside when I was an assistant coach in the baseball team when I went back and taught at West Point. Here’s what I will say is all these different sports, and it’s for those out there that have children that are playing, like there are specialized coaches now for each sport.
There’s hitting coaches, there’s pitching coaches, there’s, depending upon what sport you play, there’s specialized coaches. I like to look at myself as no different as a specialty, but my specialty is helping athletes with the mental side. And so what you saw that West Point did with CEP, the Olympics was also, I think one of the first entities and really to buy into sports psychology and have these folks.
And so it’s commonplace now at the Olympics. Guess what? It’s also commonplace in every major sports league that we have. What you’re going to see over time, and I know I’m biased here, but what I think you’re going to see over time is that we see it in the pro ranks right now. Most power five conferences have a fleet of folks like myself that are working with their athletes.
You’re gonna start seeing this at lower levels. So high schools are gonna have somebody on staff at this point, the competitive travel leagues and those sorts of things. So I’m working with a travel soccer league here in New Jersey where they want this to be provided to all of their athletes that are in the program.
So I think you’re just gonna see more and more of this filter down. I think the analogy here too, on the business leadership side is think of 35 years ago, 40 years ago, if a CEO from a Fortune 100 place said that he or she had a coach, had a leadership coach, they were probably looked at as what’s wrong with you?
What’s wrong with you? You need a coach. Guess what? Today? If you asked a fortune 100 CEO, they would be weird if they didn’t have a coach and they would go, what’s wrong with you? You don’t have a coach. So I think you’re going to start seeing the same types of things in the athletic ranks in terms of mental performance coaches.
NM:
Relate to that. Could you provide an example or success story regarding how optimal self talk mindful visualization exercise may make a tangible difference in the ability of a client to perform under pressure.
Building Resilience & Excellence In Athletics [17:42]
BP:
Yeah. One of the cool things that maybe this is not a good business technique, but I usually try to talk parents and athletes out of working with me so that there’s no confusion over like expectation management, right?
So I always tell athletes and parents up front that what I teach your athlete is not guaranteed to improve their performance in any way, shape or form. Like I’m not guaranteeing that. If you go through my program, you’re going to become an all-American. However, what I do say is that I will teach you the same types of tools and techniques that I teach to my professional athletes, NFL kickers, LPGA golfers.
And so with that, if you go to my website and you go to my testimonials page, you will see a tons of athletes and leaders in a variety of different fields to include military officers, to include former NCAA coaches of the year. And then my favorite is like working with those division one athletes and the high performing high school athletes that are out there.
And so you’ll see a number of different kind of cool anecdotes from athletes performing in the clutch. And my favorite actually is when athletes go through adversity. And then they use these skills in order to bounce back and improve. And so everything from scoring the New Jersey state championship wax goal in the final seconds to the athlete that was struggling with her confidence, but is now a two-time all-American to me, there’s a lot of different good anecdotes. You can go take a look at my testimonials page.
AD:
And I think that you spoke earlier about the application to the business world and having executive coaches. I just think that on a day to day basis, I think we’re also looking at worker burnout or the mental aspect of being prepared, at least in our world of negotiations for potentially a big boardroom deal that I’ve got to go into the same skills, how I talk to myself, how I breathe, how I perform, how I prepare mentally. I would think just have such translation to really any context and those tools are going to become even more critical as we continue. Continue on.
BP:
Yeah. I think my favorite example or analogy here is cell phone, your cell phone updates. When I go speak to corporate clients, I’ll say who in here has an iPhone? Large portions of the crowd can raise their hand. And I say, so what iOS software platform are you working under right now? Is it 1.0? And I get the laugh, right? I say, how many people in here have computers and are still rocking windows 98, right? And obviously people are like, no, what are you talking about?
And that’s because, but if you’re like me, when you get that software update on your phone, you can’t hit that thing fast enough, right? Because you want your, the most efficient high speed software running on your hardware. You want your hardware to have that capability. And so the analogy here is like, when have we updated this thing?
And for a lot of us, unfortunately, there are mindset, I would say, approaches that haven’t been updated in decades. In some cases, it might even be that nasty thing that a teacher said to you when you were 12 or a coach said to you when you were 14 that is still rattling around in their head. You go back to the negotiations piece that you were referring to before, Aram. It’s like, when you are approaching that negotiation, what is your approach? How are you talking to yourself?
But what I tell people is, if you don’t know whether your self talk is hurting you or helping you, I guarantee you it’s hurting you because it’s how we’re designed, right? But you get to change that. And so my thing is to do a mindset reset before these major events so that you’re giving yourself the best opportunity to perform at a high level.
I’ll give you one quick anecdote from the Olympics. I can’t remember his name at this point, but now he’s super famous. He was the pobble horse expert from Penn State, right?
And everyone has seen he’s a walking sports psychology, like poster boy at this point, from visualization to all these different things. One of the tools that we talk about in the program, but I think is helpful for negotiations or for test taking anxiety or closing the deal is like reframing so like when we get aroused because we care about a particular event that’s coming up and we get started getting nervous and anxious about it again, he’s using very popular technique in sports psychology called reframing. So instead of looking at it as a threat and what happens if I screw up.
Can you reframe it so that, Hey, I’m excited to, as he put it, represent my country. I’m excited to go out there. And I’m reminded of the quote from Billie Jean King, which is pressure is a privilege. So I know this is in coming up in November, but like back in the summer when the US tennis players are coming out of their locker room at the US open at Ashe center court.
There is a plaque at the end. You can see it and it’s the last thing that they see before they go under center court. And it’s pressure is a privilege. And I love that concept.
AD:
You’ve mentioned the power of adversity and loving to see the concepts and tools you teach practiced in that environment. You also talked about earlier how important failure is in our relationship to failure and experience in it to learn and grow. The concept, the term we use regularly today is resiliency. I was in a program with some young corporate leaders just last week, talking about resiliency through times of great organizational change. What do you think are the common misconceptions around resiliency and how do you address and correct these misconceptions to help individuals build their own resilience?
Cultivating Resilience: A Key To Leadership & Personal Growth [23:03]
BP:
Yeah, this is obviously a big topic in sports psychology in the sports world. But I think you also see it in the military. You see it in business. Maybe a common misperception is you either have it or you don’t, right? And so this is one where I think resiliency can be trained no different from learning how to be better at Excel. And yes, do I think that some people are naturally more resilient than others? Of course, but this kind of fallacy that you either have it or you don’t, I feel is not useful.
NM:
It’s been a very powerful discussion. Thank you so much, Bryan. As we prepare to conclude, what final thought or takeaway would you like to leave our listeners with to help them on their journey to become more effective leaders?
BP:
I go back to the notion of the cell phone. Update. When is the last time that the folks listening to NEGOTIATEx podcast have updated their mindset? It’s your most important software. So what’s that old Chinese proverb that says best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago. The second best time is today. So that would be my recommendation.
AD:
I love it. And especially as you talk about the fact that leadership is a people business and people are constantly changing. In the same way, the reason we get those updates on our cell phone is because threats and apps and other things are changing. So we got to update, right? Patch holes and gaps.
And we need the same thing as we’re dealing with our people who are constantly changing too. Bryan, thanks so much. Really appreciate you spending time with us. Excited to see where Top Mental game goes from here, but thanks for your insights. And again, just a best wishes to you and the team.
BP:
Yeah, Aram, Nolan. Thanks for the opportunity to connect with your audience. Appreciate it.
NM:
Well, that is it for us on today’s podcast. If you haven’t already, please rate, review and subscribe to the NEGOTIATEx podcast, and we’ll see you in the next episode.
