In Episode 12, Mike talks to Vanessa Shannon, Director of Mental Performance for the University of Louisville Athletic Department and Norton Sports Health since October 2015.
Prior to moving to Louisville, Dr. Shannon spent two years at IMG Academy in Bradenton, FL. While at IMG, Dr. Shannon served as the Mental Conditioning Coach for the Girls’ Soccer and Basketball programs, coordinated Psychological Test Preparation for IMG’s NFL Combine Training Program, and served as a Vision Training Coach for the Academy’s Major League Baseball Off-Season Training Program. While at IMG, Dr. Shannon also served as the Mental Conditioning Coach for the University of Louisville Women’s Lacrosse and Women’s Soccer Programs.
Dr. Shannon has been invited to speak at camps, clinics, classrooms, and conferences both nationally and internationally. In the Spring and Summers of 2010, 2011, and 2012, Dr. Shannon traveled to Lund and Halmstad Universities in Sweden, Leipzig University in Germany, and Aarhus University in Denmark, where she taught lectures and short courses on the psychology of injury, team dynamics, and careers transitions in sport as part of the European Masters in Sport and Exercise Psychology Erasmus Mundus Programme International Scholar Initiative.
Dr. Shannon holds a PhD in Kinesiology, Recreation, and Sports Studies with a specialization in Sport Psychology and concentration in Counseling from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She holds a MS in Kinesiology with an emphasis in Exercise Psychology from Kansas State University and BAs in Health and Human Performance and Psychology from Rice University. While at Rice University, Dr. Shannon was a member of the Women’s Volleyball team.
In this episode, Vanessa discusses her experiences as a mental performance coach at one of the most successful Division I athletic programs in the United States. Perhaps most interesting is the shift Vanessa has seen in student-athletes' willingness to ask for help with respect to mental health and training.
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Intro: Welcome to The Freshman Foundation Podcast. Helping you make the jump from high school athletics, to the collegiate level and beyond, with your host, Michael Huber.
Mike: Hey everyone, I'm Mike Huber, founder and CEO of The Freshman Foundation. Welcome to The Freshman Foundation Podcast, a podcast specifically geared toward the transition from high school to college athletics. My guest in this episode is Vanessa Shannon, Director of Mental Performance for the University of Louisville and Norton Sports Health since October 2015.
Prior to arriving in Louisville, Dr. Shannon spent two years as a mental conditioning coach at IMG Academy, where she worked with the girls soccer and basketball programs. She also coordinated psychological testing preparation for IMG's NFL Combine Training Program, and served as a vision training coach for the Academy's Major League Baseball off-season training program.
From 2005 to 2013, Dr. Shannon worked in various academic capacities as a practitioner and a researcher in the university setting. Please welcome Vanessa to the podcast. Hi, Vanessa, how are you?
[00:01:12]Vanessa: I'm doing well. Thanks.
Mike: Thanks for coming on today. I really appreciate it.
[00:01:16]Vanessa: Absolutely. I'm excited.
Mike: Happy New Year. To get started, why don't you just tell everybody a little bit more about your background as a mental performance coach?
[00:01:25] Vanessa: Sure. It's a long story, but I'll try to shorten it. I was a collegiate student athlete, so I played volleyball at Rice University and at the time, thought I wanted to go into sports medicine, be an orthopedic surgeon and just had some timely things happen in my life, that all aligned to point me in the direction of performance psychology.
At the time, coming out of undergrad, I had no clue where to look or what to do. I was lucky enough to have some mentors. Did my master's degree actually, at Kansas State University in exercise psychology. It was supposed to be in sport psychology, and there was a shift right when I got there, so that actually has served me well, because I learned a lot about behavior change. I use that certainly in my daily work with student athletes here at the University of Louisville, and our coaches and things like that.
After graduate school, I went into academia for a period of time and my passion really fell in student athlete and coach interactions. I had the opportunity to ship to IMG and then, was lucky enough to create a relationship or walk into an existing relationship with the University of Louisville during my time there, and ended up here in a full-time position. I'm honored and privileged to be serving our student athletes as in-house, in the athletic department, provider of mental performance services.
Mike: It's an incredible place to be, I would imagine, in terms of just the depth and the breadth of the athletic department athletic program at Louisville. Can you just talk a little bit about just where you're at today, and what your day-to-day responsibilities are there ,in mental performance?
[00:03:00] Vanessa: Absolutely. I've been here, this is my sixth year, I'm starting my sixth year, we're in the middle of my sixth year, and every year really, my day-to-day responsibilities have evolved. Being one person serving 23 teams and 650 student athletes. I do work in conjunction with Kate O'Brien, who is a licensed clinical social worker and she's our director of mental health, and Dr. Chris Peters, who is a psychiatrist, so they serve our student athletes clinical needs.
Each year, I've tried to change what I'm doing a little bit to be able to accommodate more student athletes and better serve our teams. Now, the model that we're working with, as much as possible, I'm doing a lot of team-level delivery to try and cast a wide net, and obviously, that's going to serve some of our teams better than it's going to serve other teams just in terms of meeting needs.
Then, I do do individual consultations with student athletes. I meet with our coaching staff a lot, to try and do some indirect consulting through them. They're very open and trusting of that work. I also rely heavily on our support staff. I work with our support staff, talk to our support staff, meet with our support staff on a daily basis for any given team, because they truly are, sports medicine, sports, nutrition, sports performance, the eyes and ears, who are there daily, when I can't be there daily.
A day in the life of me varies greatly, but it includes many of those things. In addition to practicing competition, sitting on the bench, standing in the dugout. Being there so that obviously they know I care and they care about what I'm saying.
Mike: I think what you're saying is, is that you've figured out a way to clone yourself so you can be in more than one place at one time.
[00:04:36]Vanessa: I've attempted that unsuccessfully. I've instead realized that I have a lot of phenomenal staff here that are willing to learn the language and speak the language, and use it in the work that they do daily with our athletes. I'm very, very grateful to that.
Mike: For somebody who's in the field, I think that that's a really interesting thing to learn more about. There has to be a lot of education from you to them, and a lot of delegation in a lot of ways. You can't be hands-on, or as hands-on maybe, as you want to do all the time. You have to rely on other people to then take that information and pass it down the line. How do you find that within such a big and high-powered athletic department?
[00:05:22]Vanessa: That's a great question. Really, it was about determining the nuances within each individual program and what would best fit their needs and meet their needs. Certainly, for some of our programs, it's better for me to provide education to the coaches and the support staff, and allow them to be boots on the ground, so to speak.
Then with others, the preference, whether it be of the coach, like some of our coaches want me to be the person speaking about these things, and they want to integrate it into their practice plans, and they want to integrate some of what's going on, but they really want me to stand as the expert in the mental space.
It's taken some time to navigate which teams which model works best for, but I think we've finally gotten to a space where we've figured that out. Again, I'm just super appreciative of our coaching staffs and our support staff in particular, sports performance, our strength and conditioning coaches, and the work that they do with our student athletes, because they have so many more touch points with our student athletes than I do on a daily basis.
They do a lot of professional development within their unit and department, and have invited me into the fold in their roundtables and things like that, to provide some context and some education for them so that they can, again, speak the language
Mike: I think you made reference in your intro about your experiences at Rice as an athlete, when you were in college. I did take the opportunity to listen to at least some of a podcast recording that you did with Dr. Cindra Kamphoff, who's also another highly respected professional in the sport psychology field. You talked more about it, and I thought it was really interesting about how that inspired you or how that affected you. Can you just talk a little bit more, as was at the time, like your experience in college and how that affected you?
[00:07:11]Vanessa: Yeah, absolutely. I joke with people when they ask me how I got into the field, I always say, "Oh, I wasn't very good at the mental game, and I couldn't fix myself, so I figured out I could help other people be better at it." The irony really is, I actually was way more attuned to what was going on in my head than maybe a lot of high school athletes are, and I can thank one of my dear friend's mom's who pointed it out to me at one point when she realized I was kind of my own worst critic.
In high school even, I remember paying attention to the thoughts I was having and how they were influencing my performance. I may have shared this in the other podcast, but I can remember specifically, I was struggling with my serve. My dad used to sit at the back of the gym, and he'd be back there and he was convinced it was my toss.
Every time I went to serve, he'd go "Good toss." It just drove me insane for a period of time until I sort of embraced it and realized that he actually had the winning ticket there. If I would just focus on winning my toss, then the rest of my serve would be okay. I think I really parlayed that into my college experience, and was able to be maybe a step ahead of some of my teammates in wrangling my thoughts and being able to use them in an effective way to influence my performance.
Then, I experienced a pretty significant injury, an unusual volleyball injury at not a great time in my career, and I had to transition out of my career as a player and served as a student coach for a year. Through that, allowed me a different lens to reflect on student athletes and their experience, and the challenges they face, and the demands they face.
Then, just around the same time, it happened that we had an industrial and organizational psychologist, a pitching staff in one of the major league organizations come and talk to one of my elective classes, and I thought, "Wow." something that I never really wanted to do. I think I mentioned this in the other podcast, my parents used to always say, "You're a really good listener, you're good at problem-solving, you should be a psychologist."
I was like, "I don't want to listen to people's problems for the rest of my life." but what I realized is that I could bridge these two things. I think having the experience as a student athlete, I don't think everybody has to have it to do good work with athletes and with student athletes, but I do think that having that experience as a student athlete, and seeing myself adopt these strategies and tools, helps me at times better translate that to our student athletes here.
Mike: For sure. I think that one of the things that we're drilled with when we're going through our training is to be able to be empathic. To be empathetic, to be able to put ourselves in other people's shoes. Sometimes it takes having that experience, but also it's just having going through adversity. Being able to look at somebody and say, "Hey, I know what you're going through. I can help you through this." Versus saying, "Hey, go ahead. You can figure this out on your own." Which is something you talked about in that other podcast, which I was really fascinated by.
That ability to ask for help or feel like you can ask for help and not have to do everything on your own. Which I imagine is something you see quite a bit with college-level athletes, particularly high-level ones, who come in and think, "Hey, I got this." and then they get there, and they're lost, but they don't know how to get themselves out of it by asking for help.
[00:10:25]Vanessa: Absolutely. I don't know whether I mentioned this on the other podcast, but another piece of my college experience that sort of influenced me in the way that you're particularly speaking, is I lost a very good friend of mine, and he died my freshman year, and I spent a year refusing to ask for help. I spent a year thinking the right thing to do was to be strong and battle it myself, and over time, realized that the right thing to do was ask for help when I needed it.
Certainly, that allows me I think, to connect with our student athletes, and convince them maybe more quickly, that asking for help is a strength and not a weakness, but I definitely think you hit the nail on the head. When you look at a place like the University of Louisville and the caliber of student athletes that we get as they come in their first years here, many of them have never needed to ask for help before. Definitely, they've come up in this sport ethic, and this win-at-all-costs mentality where asking for help is seen as not a good thing. It's seen as a weakness or a detriment.
We battle against that still a little bit, and we're trying to expediate the process of convincing them to ask for help when they need it.
Mike: What are some of the things that you might do to help them to come towards you in that respect. To get them to open their eyes and say like, "I really want to ask for help?" Or is it just an organic process where they have to just figure it out on their own?
[00:11:45]Vanessa: I think it depends on the athlete, certainly. I think it's probably here maybe like 70/30, I would argue. We've really worked hard, and when I say 'we' I mean myself, and Kate O'Brien, and Dr. Peters, as well as our coaching staff and our administration, to just make mental performance and mental health part of the Louisville way, part of something that we do here.
The minute that athletes step on campus, myself and Kate are in front of them and talking to them. Some of them, there's that convincing piece, they see us around, me more than Kate, because the things they're talking about with her, they may be perceived to be more sensitive, but I'm at practice, I'm on the sidelines, I'm on the pool deck. I travel with our teams.
I think face-time, that helps with the organic piece of it, but I think the other thing that helps, honestly, is our student athletes, because it's part of the way we do things, are willing to share their experiences with the people around them. When I first got here, the biggest referral source for me was coaches and athletic trainers. Now I would say the biggest referral source for me is teammates and selves, so people self-referring. I think that's a testament to the work that we've done, and that our coaching staff have done to really normalize seeking help.
Mike: What I think you've just described is being able to really build a culture. A culture where it's not only acceptable, but it's sought out. Where they're saying, "Hey, you should talk to Dr. Shannon. You should talk to Vanessa because she can help you." Getting that at the athlete level, is really like the stamp of approval, because if one athlete says it to another, then it's like, "Well, okay, I know I can trust this person." Versus if it comes from above, "Well, is there an ulterior motive? Why are they asking me to do this?" Or like, "Do they think they're trying to test me or something?" versus the athletes, they're trying to help each other.
[00:13:41]Vanessa: Absolutely. I think too, the way that we speak about it here, in terms of it being more of a-- I think you can slip into the medical model. You can be a treatment source, you can be a person who's there for people when they need help, but we always talked about this at IMG and I've tried to stay true to this in my career, you don't have to be bad to get better. That's really the way in which we frame it. We frame it in terms of mental skills and mental performance, and being able to perform at your best when your best is required.
We focus more on the preparation than we do on the solving of the problem. Certainly, that has to happen at times, but I definitely think in the last five years, we've seen a shift as well there, where student athletes are more often coming in, because they have questions about how they can raise their game compared to coming in because they have a problem with their game at the moment.
Mike: That's something that always comes up. That Band-Aid model of, "We're going to try to fix the problem." Versus "No, you always need to be working on this. You always need to be getting better." "How do I expand my game? Or how do I reach my potential?" Versus "How do I fix these little holes in my game?" That's a great thing, but just the same, if you have 650 athletes in the program that you're responsible for, there have to be varying levels of motivation from 1 to 650?
Can you just talk about what that looks like, the buckets of like, and I'm going to oversimplify here, but there's probably a handful that say, "I don't need this, I don't want to be bothered." There's some that are like, hyper, focused, and go-getters, like, "I want to do whatever I can." Then there's probably a bunch in the middle that are at the top of the bell curve. What does that look like from a motivational standpoint, at the individual level?
[00:15:25] Vanessa: I think you probably hit it dead on in that there are these three buckets, and I don't think it's oversimplifying it, I think it's pretty accurate. It probably is, honestly does play out to be the rule of thirds a bit. We have 33-point whatever percent of them come in and don't think they need any help. 30, the other some odd percentage come in and maybe see it useful, but aren't as willing to buy in consistently. Then you have this other third who want it, and they want to be able to do it, and they want to consume as much information as possible.
I think what you really see honestly, is that transition throughout their time here. Again, a lot of first-years are going to come to campus, having been the best athlete on their high school team, or at their high school club, maybe in their state, and they're going to have found a way to be successful on typically talent and work. In the space of work, it's going to be physical, tactical, and technical, not a lot of mental work.
So or nutrition, or some of the stuff we're doing in the weight room, or the recovery stuff from a sports medicine perspective, and so it's a bit about convincing them, "Okay, this is something that you maybe didn't need to be successful at that level, but you do need it to be successful at this level." I would say that face-time and building that rapport is totally the currency of trust, and so I think that helps too.
One, it's a progression over time, from first year to second, third and fourth year, of realizing, "Okay, I do need to do more here to be successful than I did in high school and club." but it's also a matter of, they just become more comfortable with seeking the service because they see others around seeking that service.
Mike: If you had to put a guess on it, you had a guess, out of all those athletes that come in every year, the freshmen who come in, could you guess what percentage of them have been exposed to some sort of mental coaching before they get to the university?
[00:17:17]Vanessa: Yes. We try to do intakes with as many of our first-years as possible. We split them up between Kate and myself, and just spend 10 or 15 minutes with them. Whether that's getting in front of them as a team and being able to ask that question, "Raise your hand, how many of you have had interaction with some type of sports psychology or performance psychology professional before or mental skills coach?"
It's a little bit hard to estimate, only because I think there's so many names for it now, that sometimes I'll say something and they won't raise their hand. Then two months later, they'll come in and ask me a question and will say, "Oh, I worked with this person." and it was basically someone like me.
I would say it's probably like 5 to 10%. It's not a lot. It's not a lot, but I think also, that's expected because the field is still growing. Now, if you were to ask the question, instead, "How many of you have consulted some type of resource about your mental game, not just a human being or a professional, but a book, a podcast, you watch some videos, something like that?" then that number goes up significantly?
Mike: I think it's much more ubiquitous, it's out there. I think people are much more aware that it exists and that there are resources, but yes, that one-on-one say, mental coaching, even at the team level, I think is still pretty uncommon, which I think over time, it will become more common, especially as athletics continue to grow as pretty significant business in the United States and abroad.
So because the focus of the conversation here is about that transition from high school to college. Can you just talk a little bit about what are some of the most common, if there are common challenges that you see your freshmen have coming into Louisville?
[00:19:00]Vanessa: I think the most common things that I see and we see collectively, are not necessarily going to surprise people, but they might surprise people because I'm at the University of Louisville, and we have a really competitive athletic department across the board, across all of our sports. We do get high-talent, highly competitive, high-work ethic athletes, and I think sometimes people think, "Oh, that will make it easier for them to facilitate that transition."
We get a lot of big fish small pond, now they're small fish, big pond. I don't say small fish, big pond, I say instead, average size fish, big pond, where again, they used to be the best, now they're one of the best. That certainly can make the transition difficult. I think the other big thing that we see is a lot of our student athletes come from spaces again, where they were very talented, they worked very hard. They contributed significantly in the value to their team, and so they got a lot of praise from their coaches.
When they get here and I have this conversation, oftentimes with our first-years, our coaches have between 8 and 20 hours with you, depending on where you are in season. If their job is to win, they have to help you get better. If they have to help you get better, they're not going to spend much of those 8 or 20 hours telling you how awesome you are. They're going to spend it instead, telling you what you need to do to get better.
That can be taxing on confidence I think, because many student athletes as we see them transition from high school to college, if we think of confidence like a currency that we earn, they're used to earning that confidence through what they hear a lot, instead of what they do, or through how they feel instead of what they do.
The coaches can contribute significantly to their confidence until we help them understand that they're really the owner of that confidence, and they can earn it through the things that they do on a daily basis. I think those two things would probably be the biggest challenges.
Mike: Yes, it's interesting, because when I started to think of this idea, this concept of "What's this transition going to look like for these athletes?", 'big fish in a small pond' is exactly the phrase that comes to mind. Like, you're the big man or big woman on campus, everybody tells you how wonderful you are, you have very little competition. The best player in my school or my county, my state, whatever, and then you show up and you are, I like the way you put it, an average fish. You're not a small fish, you're just as good as everybody else. You're not special anymore, necessarily.
I would imagine from an ego perspective, that has to be a little bit challenging for a lot of the athletes, particularly, the ones who are motivated by rewards and praise and things, and not motivated simply by internal drive.
[00:21:38] Vanessa: Absolutely. I think the other thing that contributed to that too that I didn't necessarily mention, but I'm sure everyone kind of considers is, if you are that person, if you are the best player in your club team or your high school team, and your goal and your motivation at that level is to get to this level, it's very easy to become very egocentric, and the people around you are allowing that to happen.
We will even find that some of our best athletes come here and they potentially have a lower sport IQ, or they have bad habits, they cut corners. A lot of that I think, comes from the fact that they were able to overcome those things, and so coaches potentially, didn't focus on fixing them. Just "Let them be, let them do their thing, they're talented enough to get to the next level." but when your focus is, "I'm trying to get a division one scholarship. I want to play for a top 20 team." or whatever it might be, it's very easy to become me-oriented.
Then you get here, and it's a real shock to that ego, because, and I talk about this all the time with our student athletes, but Louisville has 10 letters, I've counted it 5000 times to make sure I'm right. We talk about those 10 letters and what they mean to you and what you're willing to do to protect them. It's not about you anymore, it's about those 10 letters, and that can certainly be a shock to them.
Mike: That's interesting. I don't know if this is the opposite of that, but I have heard this advice from college athletes who came from high school and got a shock coming to college, the level of competitiveness, that idea that you're fighting for playing time, and that when they were in high school, everybody was buddy buddy, and we're all friends. You come to college, and then all of a sudden somebody is trying to take your job, or wants your minutes, and then it's maybe not as collegial?
Is that something that athletes struggle with too? That idea of, "I have to actually fight for playing time? Maybe somebody doesn't like me, because I'm taking their spot." How often does that come up?
[00:23:27]Vanessa: I would say that comes up often. You would think "Oh, it's more common in team sports." but really, here, at this level, everything is a team. Even in golf, you're qualifying, you're trying to fight for one of the spots. In tennis, you're trying to get to the one position. In rowing, you're trying to be in the V8 or whatever boat you perceive the most valuable, and certainly, that role can affect people.
The change in the role and the fact that, and I think you bring up a really great point, you were the best, you were praised a lot. Now, everybody is the best, everybody is praised a lot. You used to be able to maintain that cohesion, the social cohesion, maybe with your teammates, because you were so much better than everybody else, so there was nobody fighting you for your position or for your playing time, or whatever it is. Now, there's a total shift, and you do see that.
We talk a lot about the influence of role acceptance and role satisfaction on cohesion, and on being able to maintain that cohesion, and it's challenging. More challenging for some athletes than for others. I reference oftentimes, Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan, and this notion that effectively, as it's reported to us, Phil Jackson had to have a conversation with Scottie Pippen at some point and explained to him, "You'll never be Michael Jordan. You can go somewhere else and you can be their franchise player and their best player, or you can stay here and you can win a bunch of championships with us."
I think it's still a challenge for our student athletes, for some of them at least, to accept that role, because either they don't love it or it's really not what they thought they signed up for, but that absolutely can impact them.
Mike: Well, that's interesting. I don't think I would have anticipated asking this question, but it seems to me, at least in the high-profile sports like the footballs and basketballs, it's a lot easier to transfer nowadays. At least that's what I perceive from the outside. Is that an issue you're dealing with more with athletes, who are thinking about, "Well, I didn't sign up for this, get me out of here." and you're trying to talk with athletes who want to transfer out of the program?
[00:25:28]Vanessa: Yes. Don't quote me on this, this is not scientific data, but it is my guess based on my experience at Rice and then being involved in the athletic department at Kansas State and Tennessee when I was in grad school, even Tennessee Wesleyan, where I was first, is a small NAIA school, but very competitive, athletically, and then West Virginia. Compared to now here, I do think it's easier to transfer, and I think it's far more common.
In fact, my nephews are 13 and 16, and great athletes, and thinking about the opportunity and trying to earn the opportunity to play college athletics. My brother actually married one of my teammates from college, so my sister-in-law is a good friend of mine and teammate. My brother played college volleyball.
We talk all the time about how proud I am to wear Rice gear still to this day, and walk around and have that loyalty to my college and my team and things like that. Unfortunately, I think it's just the landscape of athletics now, and college athletics. I think there are a lot more transfers, and there's less of that loyalty. That's not a criticism of the student athletes in any way. I think, again, it starts with the structure and organization of youth sport and junior sport right now, where there are so many more opportunities.
When I was growing up in Southern California, there was one club volleyball program within 20 miles of me, and if I wanted to play for another, I would have to drive an hour. People are going to hear me say that, student athletes, and think I was raised in like the '50s. That was in the '90s, people, okay. But now, just in Orange County, California, where I grew up, there's three, four or five club programs. If I'm not having a good experience over here, I can just go over here instead.
That choice, I think, creates less loyalty. It reinforces that egocentrism of, "It's about me and it's about my best interest."
Mike: It's a really interesting point, and I have young children who are in their early pre-teens, but we already see it at this age, with so many clubs. If they're not happy with where they're at, whether they're not happy with the coach or not happy with the team, the performance, there's really nothing keeping them there. They can jump to another club very easily and it's just normal. It's like that's the culture of sport now.
It sounds like it's just something that you've got to figure out how to deal with versus saying, "Oh, I'm going to resist it." or saying "This can't be." I was just curious, it came up out of nowhere, but the question I did want to ask is the segue going back to what we were talking about is, for those who come in as freshmen, what are some of the things that the most successful freshmen or those who are transitioning most successfully, what are they doing? What types of actions are they taking to make that transition as successful as possible for themselves?
[00:28:15]Vanessa: I think the ones who have the most successful transitions are the ones who right that ship the soonest. They buy in, they understand fairly quickly that it has to be a win-win situation. It has to be about them being successful, and the team being successful. They're coachable, they're proactive. They reach out, and ahead of time, they ask permission rather than forgiveness.
Again, these are a lot of things that maybe they never had to do before, and they're not super comfortable doing. Ultimately, all of those things come down to one thing for me which is, I think, the most successful transitions happen with athletes that are willing to get uncomfortable more quickly. There's a quote, 'Excellence requires discomfort.' and we talk about that a lot. One of our tenets of the cardinal mindset is welcome discomfort.
I think it has to start there. It has to start with them realizing, "Okay, I don't know everything, I don't have everything figured out. Let me step into this uncomfortable space and be willing to seek the assistance of the people around me."
Mike: That obviously to somebody like me, that makes sense, but I think I was envisioning you being in a room with 25 athletes on a team, and I was thinking about how many athletes are going, nodding their heads yes versus shaking their head no. What's that like? Like when you're talking about, "Oh, embrace discomfort." or "Be okay with adversity and all that stuff." Do they lean into you? Or do they just go, "Hmm."?
[00:29:44]Vanessa: Yeah, it takes a minute for them. It's a very slow leaning. I think some of them, many of them come here, and they want to do whatever it takes. We talk a lot about willingness here. We talk about the fact that everybody wants to win. There's no space where people don't want to win. Everybody wants to win. The difference maker is are you willing to do what it takes to win?
I think we do our best in the recruiting process, and I've worked with our coaches and our coaches have worked very hard to develop questions and observations and things that they can do to try and identify people that may lean in more quickly. When I first got here, I blew up the recruiting model a little bit because I said, "In swimming, do we want the state champion? Or do we want the person that chased down the state champion over four years and got closer to their best time, because the state champion has never had to chase anybody down.
If we put them in a pool against another state champion, and at the turn, they come out behind, are they going to be able to chase that person down?" I think our coaches had been stuck in a model which just makes perfect sense, this competitive model of, "We need the best to be the best."
I over time have helped them understand, "You all are some of the best because you can teach people to be better. Let's look for these things that maybe we can't make better in four years, or we can't improve as easily in four years, let's bring him in and have you make him a better basketball player, a better golfer or whatever it is. The lean-in is a little bit slow at times. A lot of times I can convince them to do it with other examples of adversity, of people who they look up to in their sport, that they see on TV who've gone through adversity.
The other challenge I think we face is we can sometimes create adversity for them to get them comfortable. Raise the demands in practice and things like that, but some of that adversity is just happenstance. It's just what your life was like. My nephews are both football players and baseball players, and I talk a lot about J.J. Watt and his perseverance and his quote, 'Success isn't owned. It's leased, and rent is due every day.'
Then my nephew looked at me and he said, "So are you saying that I have to go to one school, come home from that school, sell pizza on the weekends to earn money to go to a new school, and that's how I get what I want?" It's like, "Well, you can't script that." So some of the adversity is just happenstance, but we do try and help them become comfortable with the uncomfortable.
Mike: The motivation is something I talk to about my athlete clients all the time. Like, "Well, what do you want, sort of what you described. What you talked about in the podcast with Cindra. Attacking the gap. What do you want? What's your goal, and what are you willing to do to get there?" If I ask an athlete, "Hey, what do you want?" "Well, I want to do this." "Are you willing to do what it takes to get there? What are the things you're going to do?" They just look at me and go, they make a face at me.
I'm like, "Well, you're not going to get to where you want to go unless you do something." I said, "If you don't want to do it, that's okay. Just understand that there's a consequence to that. If you don't do the work, someone's going to pass you." I liked what you said about the recruiting model because I think that that's important.
You're going in and understanding motivational styles. Are you getting the intrinsically motivated athlete who's maybe a little bit lower on the ability level, but they're going to work to reach their potential, or you're going to take the superstar who has a hard time when they're challenged? I think that that's really interesting, and I would imagine, it's like a portfolio almost, of assets. I hate to talk about it that way, but you're diversifying.
You want the 5-star athlete who can play at the highest level, but maybe you want a 3-star athlete who could be a 5-star athlete by the time they're a senior, and you're constantly balancing that portfolio of "I need a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and a little bit of that, to get to where we want to go as a program."
[00:33:34] Vanessa: Yeah, I think it's a great analogy. Certainly there are things that come up, and there are skills and strategies and tools that maybe an athlete lacks, but we know that we can increase their ability more quickly than other skills and strategies and tools, and you will. You need the talent.
Every program in the country that's been successful in any sport has a baseline level of talent, so you need that, but there are also these intangibles that we hear so many major league baseball organizations and NFL teams and collegiate programs talking about, and I think you have to be able to diversify your assets. That's a great way of putting
Mike: One of the things I heard you talk about which, this is in my philosophy of practice, so I jumped at and it is working with the whole person. Holistically looking at the person first or as much as you do as a performer, as an athlete. What does that look like in the program at Louisville for you, in terms of the way you do your work day to day? In terms of putting that person across all spectrums versus just saying, "Hey, we got to get the most out of the athlete."
[00:34:39]Vanessa: That's I think, a lot where I've worked with our coaches and our teams in helping them understand that piece too. To look at one another. Coaches look at our student athletes, student athletes look at their teammates as whole people, and it really goes back to something you mentioned earlier, which is just empathy and understanding. We can create more change for an individual if we understand their experience of life up until this point.
When I talk about a whole person, you have to know all of those pieces of that individual to be able to your point, motivate them better, or convince them to do the things that they need to do. I challenge our coaches a lot to get to know their student athletes as people. I also challenged our student athletes to get to know one another as people.
We do exercises with teams where we'll sit down and ask questions like, "Did you eat dinner together as a family growing up, and what was your favorite meal?" because suddenly, I'm going to learn that you did and you had two parents at home and they both worked until five, and he didn't. He only had a single mom living at home or she didn't, she only had a single dad or that person was raised by their grandparents. We learned so much about one another with those conversations.
I think the challenge that we face right now in society is we're all behind this all the time. Talking like this with one another, so we lack those organic interactions that allow us to get to know the whole person, but that is a huge piece of the work that I do.
Mike: You beat me to the next question. What are some of the things you do from a team-building perspective, to bring that out? One of the things I love to do with the teams I work with is two truths and a lie. Tell me two truths and one lie, the teammates have to guess. A lot of them are goofy, especially high school kids, they'll say silly stuff, but one time I had a kid who ended up being one of my clients that I got close to. He said, "Here are two truths and a lie." One of the truths was he was adopted, and none of the kids knew that he was adopted, and he was willing to share that.
I think that that just opened up a whole new world for a lot of the kids to say like, "Wow, I didn't know that about you. Thanks for sharing." I think those kinds of exercises are just so important for them to get to know each other, forget about athletically. Like what's my life like outside of this bubble we sit in every day playing baseball, or football, basketball, soccer, whatever it is. I think that's so important. If they don't know each other, it's going to be hard to trust each other because they don't understand.
[00:37:04]Vanessa: Absolutely, yes. You hit the nail on the head there in terms of trust, and being willing to sacrifice for one another. We talked about these 10 letters and what they mean to you, and what you're willing to do to protect them, you're going to be willing to do more to protect them if you're connected to the people around you.
I learned an activity in my time at IMG called least common denominator, which is you pair everybody up in the room, and then you say, "Okay, you figure out what you two have in common that you think nobody else has in common with you." Very instantly, you create this simple bond between those two people, and those two people might have thought they would never get along, they have nothing in common.
Suddenly, when they realize they have just this one small thing, even if it's the smallest thing in common that nobody else has in common with them, now they're connected to that person forever in that way. I do. We try and do a lot of work in that regard, to create empathy and understanding, and build trust within our teams.
Mike: I love that. I've never heard that or I've never seen anybody talk about that or do it, but that's amazing. The ability to have that common bond that you never would have found, I think that's an amazing idea. I love learning from my fellow practitioners in the field. I have to say, I would imagine that your time in IMG was really valuable in that respect.
I know all the people I've ever come across that are either there or have been there, really, their creativity is off the charts in terms of the things that IMG is able to develop internally in their mental conditioning program. Can you talk about how that experience helped you prepare for being at Louisville?
[00:38:37]Vanessa: Absolutely. Yes. I've been really blessed to have just amazing mentors and colleagues throughout my career, and just been lucky to be surrounded by a lot of really fantastic people, and had lots of really great interactions with so many people in our field. I think the uniqueness of a place like IMG is it's one of the only places where you have this large group of individuals who are all trying to work towards the same goal.
Here, I'm kind of alone on an island. I have Kate and I have Dr. Peters, and I consult with them, and we bounce ideas off of one another. I have, as I mentioned, friends and colleagues in the field that I'll call and I'll ask questions of, but just the ability to, like I shared an office with someone, so the ability to just turn your chair around and say, "Hey, what do you think about this?" was really impactful.
I think also, the other really important piece of that experience for me was probably the age group, and the very motives of the student athletes there. A lot of people don't realize that. They think it's this really high level, everybody is high achieving, everybody's a prodigy when they go to IMG, and that's not necessarily the case, in at least some of the individual sports.
In the team sports, you have to be pretty talented, but in the individual sports, we would have a tennis player or a golfer who'd never played tennis or golf before, but they needed to go to a boarding school because that's what their family did. You're talking to a group of tennis players and one of them just started playing tennis, and the other one has the opportunity to turn professional in a couple of years and maybe skip college.
In that way, I think it sounds strange to people, but we have the same thing here. We have varying levels of motives on our teams. That sounds strange I think, to people when you think Power Five, like high level division one athletics. Again, if you look at any of our programs where there's an opportunity to play professionally afterwards, some of the people on the team have that goal. Other people on the team maybe don't have that goal, so that's going to change the way that they're motivated.
We take a sport like rowing. Rowing is a really interesting sport at the collegiate level, because of the influx of novice rowers. We have some individuals who've never rowed before, they're just fantastic athletes, so they were recruited to come here to row. IMG was really helpful for me in that way. Not just to be surrounded by colleagues who I could bounce ideas off and thought share with, absolutely, that's a huge part of it.
There are so many creative minds and just different ways of looking at things, and willingness, I think, to create a safe space, which Dave Hesse, and Taryn Morgan, and Angus Mugford, and Justin Su'a, and many of the people that were our leadership during my time there, did create this safe space where it was okay to throw wrenches, and it was okay to challenge one another. Certainly, there was that aspect of it, but I think the other aspect was just variety of student athletes that I got to interact with.
Mike: Do you think the IMG mental performance model of a broader team and staff, is coming to division one athletics? Do you ultimately think that you'll be in there, in five years, you'll have six, eight people on your team because IMG led the way on that? Or do you think it's going to be a harder sell ultimately?
[00:41:47]Vanessa: Well, I can tell you from personal experience, that it's a harder sell, because when I first got to Louisville, that was the model we were striving for, was to add several staff in five years. Now, here we are five years later, without additional staff. I think the reason it's a bit of a harder sell is money.
It comes down to where you put your money and how you spend your money, and then also, the other challenge of it is college athletics moves towards more of a business model. I'm not a very good business woman, because I came in and I was like, "Oh, I'm going to do a really good job and they're going to hire me staff." I think what you find instead is if you do a really good job, they just keep letting you do a really good job by yourself.
It's hard because I know for certain events, Tyra, our AD, I know he values the work that I do, that Kate O'Brien does with our student athletes. So it's not a matter of value, and it's not a matter of them not understanding the influence that can have on our student athletes. I think it just, when it's a business model, it comes down to nickels, and dimes. We've had some things happen in my time here that have made that difficult.
Anyway, to answer your question, in general, I hope it's the model as we move forward, but I think what it's going to take is, and I'm hoping it's us, I think it's going to take one university doing that, and then other people looking around and go on, "Hold on, we need that too." Now, there are certainly some athletic departments that have multiple staff members in terms of clinical and performance, but to my knowledge, at least not yet, there's not anybody that has a whole gaggle or staff of mental performance coaches or performance staff.
Mike: I'm not aware of that either. It's interesting to me that there's a high school level academy that has it. The colleges that are making far more money off of at least the big revenue sports are doing it. I'm curious about it. It's a curiosity to me, I don't know the model well enough. We're winding down here. I want to ask you a couple more questions. Are there any books or is there any sort of resources that you recommend to your athletes, that you lean on to say, "Hey, you should read this book." Or "You should take a look at this." that you go to on a regular basis?
[00:43:57]Vanessa: Certainly Cindra's podcast, High Performance Mindset. Justin Su'a has a great podcast. I'm going to forget. There are many great podcasts out there. I'm a huge proponent of TED Talks. I think TED talks are great resources. One right now that I'm pushing on all of our student athletes is Dr. Susan David's TED talk about emotional agility. I think Shawn Achor's TED talk on happiness is phenomenal. John Wooden's TED talk on winning and succeeding is fantastic.
In terms of books, I knew you were going to ask me this question, so I actually walked past my bookcase before this. It's so hard for me to choose. It's so hard for me to choose. I think the biggest message here, and I did an interview with Inside Pitch magazine recently, and I was asked this question and I got totally stumped, and then I think I came up with the right answer.
The right answer is there are so many good resources out there, so many good books. Read them, listen to them, and then understand that not every book and not every piece of information in every book or podcast applies to you. You have to learn, "Okay, based on who I am, what can I take from this and pull from it and apply it to me?"
I have a student athlete here who would smirk if he heard me referencing him but loves David Goggins. Lots of our coaches, lots of our student athletes love David Goggins. I think he is fantastic, written some great books, very motivational, but he has a very unique path in life, and most of our student athletes didn't grow up in the environment with the circumstances he grew up. You have to ask yourself, "Do I need everything he's telling me? Or do I just need this piece over here?"
Mike: Right. David Goggins, for those who are listening that don't know, he's a former Marine, and very intense. Then you could contrast that to somebody like Dr. Bernie Brown. You can also refer somebody who has a very different personality or a very different path to that more of a compassionate, loving side of things that maybe somebody else relates a little bit better to. I couldn't agree with you more.
I like the question, because I think it's really introducing those resources, whether it's books or other things to younger people, is a really good way, not only to educate them, but I think it is a great way to build trust to say, "Hey, you don't have to listen to me. Here, take a look at that and see what you think."
A lot of times, it brings them closer to us, because they look at it and they go, "Wow, this is really interesting." and they start to ask questions. I think it's really important that we're able to bring that to light and have them make their own choices. I guess the last question I'd ask then we could wrap it up is, if there's one thing that you would suggest to any incoming freshman athlete at your university or others even, what would you suggest to them?
[00:46:33]Vanessa: I know my suggestion, I know it's difficult to do, I want to say that preemptively to anybody who might be listening, but do uncomfortable things. Get used to doing things that you don't love to do. I will ask recruits, if I have the opportunity to interact with them, "Do you do chores? What's your least favorite, what's your most favorite chore to do?" Then I'll tell them, "Do your least favorite chore for the next year until you get here."
Just simple opportunities. Whether it's introducing planned disruptions and exposure to stressors into your practice and to your individual training, just to increase the demand, get you in that space of working through discomfort.
Mike: I love that. If we had more time, I think the question I would ask you, which I'm not asking you is, how then? How do you get them to buy into that? How do you get them to do it? Because it's easy to say, but if there's no accountability, and there's no reward, and there's no real reason for them to do it, other than taking your word for it, how are we going to get them to do it?
That's probably a question for another day, so I'll stop there and I'll say thank you so much. This was an amazing discussion. I'm really thankful that you were able to come on and spend some time and talk about this. I think it'd be really helpful to the parents and the athletes who are going to have the chance to listen, so thank you again. I really had a good time.
[00:47:52]Vanessa: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.
Mike: Thanks a lot Vanessa. Take care.
[00:47:56]Vanessa: You too. Bye-bye.
Outro: Mike Huber is the founder and owner of Follow The Ball Coaching located in Fair Haven, New Jersey. He is a mental performance coach and business advisor dedicated to serving athletes just like you, reach their full potential on and off the court. The Freshman Foundation is all about helping you get to the next level. For more information, follow along on Instagram @thefreshmanfoundation. Please subscribe. Give us a like on iTunes, Spotify. Leave a review. Tell a friend. Most importantly, come back in two weeks, ready to get better.