Elevating Human Performance – Dr. Martin Jones

Dr. Cooper

Welcome to the latest episode of the Catalyst Health, Wellness, and Performance Coaching podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Bradford Cooper of the Catalyst Coaching Institute. If you were to identify your own Mount Rushmore, a handful of people who have had the most positive influence on your life, what would you identify? Today’s guest, Dr. Martin Jones would likely be on the very short list of being one of those people for me. When I decided to pursue a PhD as an extremely nontraditional student at the age of 50, Dr. Jones, along with Dr. Mark Wilson took a chance on me and essentially adopted me as their much older son during the process. Thanks to the two of them, the PhD journey, which many students frankly described as living hell was one of the best experiences of my life. Today, you’ll get to tap into some of the knowledge insights about human performance that first drew me to Dr. Jones as a mentor.

Dr. Cooper

Did you know you can earn continuing education credits now for listening to this podcast? Absolutely. We were super excited about this, we’ve working on this for months. If you’re looking for NBHWC credits, all the details are available at catalystcoachinginstitute.com. It is a specific list of podcasts right now. So read the details carefully and reach out to us anytime, email us at results@catalystcoachinginstitute.com and that email is available to any of you who have any questions about coaching, future career, current career, etc. For everyone else, if you enjoy videos, you may want to check out the YouTube coaching channel. It’s youtube.com/coachingchannel. We now have over 60 videos, it covers health, wellness, performance, and how to make the most of your coaching business and your coaching career. And all of those are freely available to you. Now let’s step up our game with insights from dr. Martin Jones on the latest episode of the Catalyst Health, Wellness, and Performance Coaching podcast. Dr. Jones, welcome to the show. Good to have you.

Dr. Jones

Thank you very much. It’s good to be here.

Dr. Cooper

Well, let’s jump right in. How can individuals elevate their performance without illegal drugs? Obviously we’ve all run down that path in the press lately, or is that not really an option? Do we just generally hit a plateau and stay there?

Dr. Jones

I think that the illegal drugs issue, they clearly are performance enhancing, but obviously it’s a hack. It’s a way of doing it illegally. And often the results might be quicker, but there are definitely ways to elevate performance, with really simple things that you can, that you can do legally. I mean the obvious one is, you know, making sure that, you know, you’re looking at your sleep, you’re getting the right sort of sleep and trying to minimize your fatigue. That’s an obvious one. My area, obviously being a psychologist, I look at the things that we can control within our own, our own mind, our thoughts, our emotions, our behaviors, and if we can tap into some of those, you definitely can elevate your performance quite a significant amount.

Dr. Jones

And I think in my experience, working with elite athletes who they’ve observed their competitors, who might be on the performance enhancing drugs, what you see is people will elevate their performance. And then with illegal drugs, what you see is that plateau stays really steady. Whereas people who are clean, you’ll often see those kinds of peaks and troughs. So, you know, some days their performance will be really good. The next it will be off a little bit. And you can, you can see that variability, whereas with performance enhancing drugs, that variability tends to just kind of be diminished or even disappeared. So what we can try and do is in the first instance is get people up to elevate their performance up to that plateau. And then we can try and think about the ways of minimizing that sort of amplitude of the performance of how it goes up and down.

Dr. Jones

And that comes from lots of different things. You know, that as a sport and exercise scientist, I kind of try and think of it in an interdisciplinary way. And it’s not just about psychology. We have to look at how all these different systems come together. And we think about performance as a developmental system where, I’ll use the analogy of you’re baking a cake and the cake has got lots of ingredients in it. And if you were to leave some ingredients out, it’s fundamentally not a cake. So if you, if you leave out your flour, it’s not a cake. If you leave out your, your eggs and your sugar, it’s not a cake, but if you leave out that kind of vanilla essence, you still get a cake. It’s just not quite as nice. It’s just not quite as good. And sometimes the performance psychology is those little ingredients that can just enable you to just get above that level. Just help you push on to the point where you really want to be. And so, yeah, it’s not necessarily the panacea for performance. You know, if you just work on your psychology, then you’ll be fine. You have to recognize it as one of those parts of that broad developmental system that can improve your performance.

Dr. Cooper

But I think that’s a good point because so many folks, you know, I think of, I run in the triathlete runner world. And so many folks are spending hours and hours and hours, swimming, biking, running, doing their core training and nothing, nothing on the cognitive side. Are there some general cognitive strategies that you’ve looked at that you think might be helpful to folks in this setting to say, Oh, wow. Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that.

Dr. Jones

Yeah, absolutely. What I like to do, if we just broadly call them life events, these can be a performance in a given sport, it could be a wedding, it could be moving jobs. You know, these things that happen to is in life. These things that, you know, that we all go through that, you know, it’s the waves of life that, that just keep coming. And we can think about temporal sequence of things we can do before an event, things that we can do during an event and things that we can do after an event, if we lay them out into that order and think about what is it that we have coming up so we can have effectively what we call these normative events. So you’re about to run a triathlon or Brad you’re going to run your next Ironman. You know, that’s coming up, you’ve got your date set and you can start periodizing, you could do that. You could also have non-normative events. So you break a leg in the lead up to that event, you have an injury or something, someone steals your bike, you know, something that you don’t expect, which interferes. So we can think before those events happen, we can spend some time anticipating. We call this anticipatory coping. We can anticipate what we expect to happen. And I think this is where you can do this on your own. I think if you’re working with a coach or you’re working with someone who’s got experience to draw from, so they can help you with things that they know is going to happen.

Dr. Jones

It’s like, you know, if you’re going to go up a mountain, you could just go up a mountain on your own. But if you’ve got a mountain guide, they can get you up there quicker and safer. So you can anticipate what’s going to happen. So we can do that with a coach and think, what have we got coming up? And that’s where we can have these before event strategies. Like our goal setting is an obvious one. That’s going to drive your behavior. That’s gonna, you know, give you something to aim for. It’s going to give you something to measure against. We can do things recognizing that, you know, probably during an event, maybe something like attention’s important. So we can, in the lead up to that event, we can practice our attention. We can do like attentional control training, where we actually practice these things in training. So that’s the, those cognitive strategies and emotional strategies and behavioral strategies. We can do them months in advance.

Dr. Jones

And that’s, that’s kind of like in the mindful meditation, you know, that practice of sitting down and be mindful in the present moment and, you know, just being aware of your bodily sensations, and that’s not necessarily something that you’re going to do in competition. You know, you don’t want to be like that. If you’re hammering down a descent, you know, you want to be aware of the turns and the sheep in the road and that kind of thing, if you’re on a bike. So that kind of being the practice of mindful meditation is a pre-event skill, which allows you to become aware of present moment. It allows you to be, it encourages a skill that then you can use during event. So some of them seem quite abstract sometimes so, you know, like imagery, typically people don’t use imagery when they’re in an event, you use it before. You practice it in the lead up to it because the function of imagery might be motivational. It can psych you up, or it can help you relax. We can help you develop a skill or a strategy. So you’re practicing these things before the event. So during the event, are things like self-talk a huge, positive self talk. Or when I say positive self talk, think within, within certain bounds, we need to make sure that we’re not grandiose. We’re not trying to fool ourselves with statements that just aren’t that, aren’t true. We have to make sure they’re kind of, they’re matched to our competencies and the situation that we’re in and our emotion, you know, if you’re feeling really anxious, you just say, you know, you feel fine. You feel great. That’s not going to work. Self-talk needs to kind of tap into that anxiety and say, right, yes, you feel anxious. This anxiety is helpful. It is going to be performance enhancing because it’s meaning my adrenaline’s going and that the blood is moving in the right place.

Dr. Jones

So, you know, you’re not replacing, positive self talk isn’t necessarily just these positive affirmations for the sake of it. We can use self talk to maybe shift our perspective in the moment. So they’re good, they’re good execution skills, if you want to call them that during the event. And you could even, you could even kind of think about like immediately before an event, like your kind of pregame routine. And if you, if you know that you’re the kind of person, that if you wait to go out for that tournament, or you’re standing on the side of the stage, ready to give a big presentation. Things like box breathing, simple relaxation techniques in that immediate time before, they can be performance enhancing more than anything. In my experience, those sorts of pre execution skills are, are almost like, um, they’re kind of like a buffer.

Dr. Jones

So the analogy that I sometimes give is if you imagine you’ve got a glass, you know, like a pint glass. And we think about that glass is like our, kind of our attentional capacity. And what can sometimes happen is that glass could be half full, we’ve got half of the glass available. Our attentional capacity is, is not used up and task irrelevant things can kind of creep in. So we, then we can start worrying. We can start thinking about, oh what if this happens? What if that happens? We start moving into present thinking, or we shift back to something that’s happened in the past. So what we can, what we can have control of is we can fill that glass with benign or just buffering sorts of thoughts. So pre-shot routines, I’ve done stuff before where I encourage people to count backwards from a hundred. So it’s just something that fills in their kind of attentional capacity. So that those task irrelevant thoughts they won’t get in, they’re using just something benign. It’s just something that’s buffering out those things. And then finally, the post event strategies we can think about, you know, that journaling, that kind of reflective activity where we’re, we’re looking back at what happened and trying to make sense of it, both the good and the bad. And then that can inform that next round of anticipation moving forward. So there’s, there’s loads of things. I mean, that’s a real whistle stop tour of cognitive strategies, but you know, there’s, there’s literally hundreds, but in my experience, breaking it down into those kind of time periods, I think is really effective.

Dr. Cooper

Great, great job setting the baseline. Let’s come back to the goal setting because that’s something that the folks listening to this, you know, coaches, athletes, high performers, they’re like, Oh yeah, I set goals. Can you take us down that path a little bit more about why that’s so powerful in terms of the performance enhancing aspect when maybe they haven’t accessed some of the potential with this?

Dr. Jones

Yeah. So goal setting is an interesting technique in my own experience. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that’s never set a goal. The way they do it is different, but everybody, I think has that experience of saying I’m currently here and I want to move there. And so the new year’s resolution is an obvious one. People have experience of doing these things, but the paradox, I guess, is that although people are accustomed to setting goals. You get many, many people who don’t necessarily follow through the new year’s resolutions. For example, people often don’t make it past January, right? So the question is like, why? So we know that the research shows is that there is a relationship between goals and performance in the broad sense. And the research shows us these kinds of mechanisms of why goal setting can increase your performance. So I think it happens through different pathways. I think one thing it improves your self efficacy beliefs. If you start, if you set yourself goals, it starts tapping into that sense of you believe that you can do it. If you are a coach or you were working with a coach, you can have self set goals or coach set goals. And I think that can be a really driving motivational force. If your coach gives you some positive feedback about, yeah, I think you can achieve that goal that’s going to motivate you that if, or even a coach says, here’s a goal that I think you could achieve, you know, that tells the athlete, that tells the client that you have confidence in them that you believe that they’re able to do it. So I think that’s one thing, goal setting can definitely drive.

Dr. Jones

It has a motivational aspect. It puts a bit of fire under you and you gives you that kind of direction, intensity of effort. So I think that’s the one thing. It has an attentional component in that you now know where you go in, you know, you’ve got that something to aim at, you could get into your car, you could just drive and you know, you might, you might end up at the destination or you might end up at a destination that is good for you, but you could end up anywhere. Whereas you put something in the navigation, you’ve got that end point. You’ve now got your turn left turn right. You’ve got your road map. If you know where you’re going and you know how to get there. And that’s what goal setting does it gives you the, it gives you the end point, you know, of when you’ve arrived, because you’ve got something, if you do a goal setting effectively, you have something measurable and specific. And it also the process aspect, it gives you that the turn, the left, the right, but importantly, it also gives you the jump off points. It gives you the goal disengagement points. When you know that you’ve gone down the wrong path, because you’ve set those goals and you’ve got that process. You recognize that you’re going down the wrong path and you do the U-turn right. And you can reengage in a different goal. So it has that attentional component as well.

Dr. Jones

And obviously the behavioral sides, you know, it’s a goal setting is a doing activity. It typically when people set goals, it’s, you know, I want to lose 10 pounds or I want to get two minutes quicker. There’s always, that’s great. But how do you then do it? And you’ve got that behavioral aspect. Goal setting I think is incredibly powerful if you do it well. When I used to teach this, when I was teaching within universities, I used to take an approach of trying to act like the, kind of the goal setting detective where you find a goal that you didn’t achieve and then kind of break it down and think, well, why didn’t you achieve it? So you can look at aspects like, um, some people just don’t have that commitment to the goal that they set. They set something that they’re not actually, it’s not, it’s not important to them. And I know we’ve talked about this before, Brad, that kind of vision now, how much of that is the person you want to be rather than just some kind of arbitrary end point.

Dr. Jones

And I think if it’s, if it’s personal, if it’s really integrating, it’s like, I want to be that person or, you know, that is something that’s really important to me. And you’ve got that extra commitment, I think that helps. I think some people set goals that are either too easy or too difficult, they lose that drive, which I think you have to have that right level of goal difficulty. I think feedback is really important if you’ve got good feedback from, if you’re on your own and it’s just the, kind of the knowledge of the results and how you go in and that reflection of how it’s going, or if you’ve got a coach, who can help give you feedback on the path. That’s really powerful and will help you achieve your goals. There’s lots of different things that can, that can influence whether you achieve your goals, even your personality. Some people are just goal setting people, you know, there’s research, which looks at this concept of core self evaluations and those individuals that you have, you know, high sense of self esteem and, and general sort of efficacy with general sort of confidence that they’re the kind of people who believe they can do stuff. And general optimists tend to do better with their goals. So a powerful approach is to play that detective and look into what’s happened before and try and say, right, okay. This time, the reason that you didn’t achieve that goal is because you didn’t use those implementation intentions. You know, you said you were going to lose weight. Your goal was to lose 10 pounds, but it just, it just went by the by because life got in the way. So this time we’re going to attach, you know, we’re going to use an implementation intention. We’re going to, when you go downstairs and switch the kettle on to make your morning coffee, you go do your 10 squats, then that’s your trigger. And, you know, you can use all the knowledge and all the evidence that we have about effective goal setting and build it into that individualized approach.

Dr. Cooper

I love the love, this concept of the detective work, the goal setting detective work. That’s not a phrase I’ve heard before, but I could see the power in doing that regardless of where you end up, you nailed it. Good job. What worked, what came to fruition or, you know, I didn’t quite hit it now, and that fits into what you talked earlier about the post event, the journaling, the reflecting, etc. I love that. That’s, that’s really valuable. Let’s talk about outside of athletics. When we talk about performance enhancing in general, it tends to, because it’s easy to measure, it’s very objective. It’s easy to say, let’s talk about it with runners or cyclists or whatever it might be. Are these concepts applicable to personal, professional, educational pursuits?

Dr. Jones

Absolutely. Um, you know, if I go back to my, my PhD many years ago now, I was looking at the idea of skill transfer of life skill transfer. And we looked at it in sports. We tried to say, now, what do kids learn when they play sport? And it really came from my own experience of being a young athlete. I was, I never made it. I never became a professional athlete. So, you know, I remember sitting in a, in a seminar, and a professor had come across from the States and was delivering a seminar and it, and it just got me thinking, you know, what have I got from sport? I enjoyed it. And no doubt about that and had many, many fun hours on the tennis court and playing rugby. And, you know, I had a great time, but was that it? You know, if I have not got a career out of it, I mean, I kind of did in the end, working in sport science, but no I’ve never played professional sport and it made me ask that question, is that the only exit point from youth sport, if you like it? Or is that, is that the most productive thing that you can get out of youth sport that you get a job as a professional athlete? And I think the answer to that was a pretty obvious, well no. There’s lots of things you get from playing sport from the, you know, the obvious health effects of being physically active. We know that we don’t have to play competitive sport, but just being physically active is beneficial.

Dr. Jones

I started to ask that question of, if you’ve got, you know, your son, your daughter, brother, sisters, playing junior football, or junior hockey, or junior tennis, whatever, what do they get out of it? And what do they do when they’re playing sport that can transfer into other areas? And it really opened up quiet a can of worms really in that there’s tons, there’s tons of stuff. You know, teamwork, communication, you know, the ability to compete without hatred, the ability to lose, the ability to win all those things that they’re the nature of the sport, but then you start saying, well, what skills do people use in sport that are valuable in other areas? And handling pressure is something that we do in every walk of life. And I think that the skills that we’re talking about that a lot of people associate with sports psychology are the same skills that enable people to thrive and to perform in the workplace in the military, in the relationships at home, you know, with loved ones in retirement that they do cross over.

Dr. Jones

So, you know, your ability to set goals might help you run that sub four hour marathon. It could help you set up a business. It’s the same process, and it can definitely apply in different areas. Now using box breathing, when you’re about to take a penalty in a kid’s sporting event, box breathing, you know, being able to control that sort of the autonomic nervous system control to help you relax, bring yourself down, that’s going to help you before a job interview. It’s a skill that you can use if you’re delivering a presentation, you feel a little bit anxious. So for sure, these, these skills, these strategies, they are not solely for sport. And if we actually look at the history of a lot of these things, they’ve come from occupation. Goal setting was not developed by sports psychologist is that’s very much an industrial and organizational psychology technique. So there is absolutely, you know, huge reciprocity between sport and all different life domains.

Dr. Cooper

You mentioned box breathing. Some people might know what that is, but can you give us the basic sense since you’ve thrown it out there a couple of times?

Dr. Jones

Yeah, sure. Thanks. So box breathing. If I’ve got this fact correct, and excuse me, if I’ve got it wrong, but it was developed by the US Navy seals used significantly, but by significantly more people than that now, but I think it was developed to them in the military and effectively you can visualize a box, a square, and you can imagine the horizontal lines are, are either inhale or exhale. And the vertical lines are just holding so that if you start in the top left hand corner of that square and you go across that first horizontal, that’s an inhale. So you inhale for a number of seconds, three seconds, four seconds. It doesn’t, I don’t think it really matters as long as it’s not like a rapid breathe, a breath in. So you breathe in for two or three seconds. You hold that breath for the same amount. So two or three seconds, and then you slowly exhale for the same amount of time. So two or three seconds, and then you hold and then you inhale again. So it’s a process of inhalation holding exhalation holding, and the process, there’s a neurological explanation for why it works. It is a part of your, your, your autonomic nervous system. You know, that the breathing influences your vagal tone and influences how you, how your nervous system functions and you feel more relaxed doing it. The origins were high pressure, probably high fear sort of situations that sort of breathing can just help regulate those, those emotions, those physiological arousal states, and bring you into that sort of sense of equilibrium. It definitely works. I use it all the time. It is a really effective technique. Very brief, it doesn’t take much practice and I found it effective in, in those times when you, you know, you might be feeling a little bit nervous. If you are going to be doing a speech or you doing a big presentation, something you can do really simply and now helps you, helps you perform.

Dr. Cooper

All right. So typical, person’s listening. They’re thinking, okay, he’s given me some tips here, but I’ve got this one thing. So I don’t know, it may be personal, professional, we won’t worry about the specifics. But are there a couple strategies you haven’t already mentioned that you’d suggest as a starting point. So they’re listening to you and they’re saying, Oh, I think there’s some real opportunity here. Are there one or two that you would say start here? This is a great starter set, beyond what you’ve already mentioned.

Dr. Jones

Tough question, but I think some really deep reflection of the why. So I think that’s a good one to start off with is if your personal, professional life, you know, you want a promotion, you want to run a marathon, you want to do a triathlon. You want to lose some weight, wherever it is that you’re considering first and foremost is have a really long look at yourself in the mirror and be honest and thinking of what’s appealing about this. Why am I doing this? What’s my motivation? And the reason I say that is that when we’re aiming for change, it’s rarely a linear path. When we, when we’re trying to do something different. If we’re trying to move to somewhere new, that we don’t usually go there in a straight line there’s ups and downs, there’s relapse. There’s those spirals of relapse where you might, you know, it’s like a Helter Skelter where you’re spinning down and then you go back up again, spin down again. Having that really strong why can help you when you’re in those troughs, when those things aren’t going as you want them to, equally, you can look at that question of why, and then it can, it can maybe stimulate to think, actually, is this what I actually want? Am I just doing what people think I should do? Am I just a reflection of what’s expected of me, but actually is it actually what I really, really want to do, or really what I am really interested in. So having that, what if I want to call it like a motivational audit where you just really, really start thinking about it, because if you want to run a three hour marathon, but actually when you start really looking into it and you realize that, you know, you hate running, but you just want to,

Dr. Cooper

Hey now nobody hates running. Nobody, just kidding everybody.

Dr. Jones

But you know, you look at it, and you said, the reason I’m doing this is because Steve down the road has done it. And I just want to beat Steve down the road, you know, when it’s raining and when it’s cold and you know, you see Steve in front of his roaring fire, chilling out, you’re not going to, it’s going to be really difficult for you to get out and run in the cold and the wet. And that’s where, I mean, you having that motivation audit, that sort of idea. Why is it you’re doing it? Are you doing it purely for esteem value, so that people will look at you in a different way. Are you, are you looking to make a change because you want more money, because you want rewards? Is it that if you didn’t do something, there’d be some kind of feeling of guilt or, you know, you’re avoiding something negative.

Dr. Jones

So you know, that the obvious one for that is I’m going running. Because if I don’t I’ll feel guilty, eating the biscuits and the cookies and the cakes and all that sort of stuff, you know, are you doing it because it’s just a reflection of, of your role in society, your job. So, you know, military personnel, fire personnel, police, they might be doing lots of physical activity because that’s just the nature of their identities, who they are. It’s like the job that they do. And then all the way down to the other end, you know, I actually love this stuff. It’s me. That who I am. That’s, you know, I couldn’t live without going for a bike ride. That is my pleasurable activity. It’s like watching a three-year-old playing that they just do it for no other reason than they just love it. Now, if you, if that’s you, if that’s you and bike riding, that’s great. And you know, you’re going to go and do those sports events. You’re going to do those races. But I think that’s where I’d start is having a real honest conversation with yourself and thinking, why am I, why am I trying to do something different? And once you’ve got that in place, now there were other things you can move on to, to try and get you to the point where you want to be.

Dr. Cooper

Okay. So this is, we’re really going down a great path here. How does that individual separate those? So it is part of their job, or it is part of what’s expected of them, or they’ve been doing it for so long. It’s just, it’s automatic. How do they distinguish? Is this really me versus is this just an extension of habit, society, expectations, etc.

Dr. Jones

I think it’s, it’s easy to have someone along with you to help you. Now, if you’ve got somebody who can maybe ask you challenging questions, be that a coach or some kind of mentor, or, you know, that would help. You can definitely do that. But I think, you know, this sort of approach doesn’t have to be something that you do once, if it’s a big thing that you’re moving into, you know, I’d say don’t rush into it. You know, spend a month, fill out a journal. Think about what things have you done in that day that have been important to you. What things have you done in that day that reflect the person that you want to become? What habits have you reinforced, what bad habits crept in that maybe other things that you don’t really want to see anymore and do it over a period of a month, six months a year.

Dr. Jones

And I mean, that, that’s the kind of thing that’s going to give you that self awareness. And, you know, I’ve been asked this a few times when, if we’re talking about, you know, elite sport, you know, what are the, what’s the one thing that separates the good from the great, or what do they, the elite athletes have the, maybe, you know, the top 10 tennis player have, but the top 500 player doesn’t have. And you know, there’s no right answer to this question. But when I worked with elite performers in the military and in sport, in academia, you know, some of the professors I’ve worked with have been elite performers in their own right. And I think self-awareness, it’s just having that knowledge of what you do, what you’re capable of, what you value, what you don’t value. And that’s not something that comes naturally to, it doesn’t come naturally to me. And I think it takes time. And I think that that may be that journaling approach in lieu of a mentor or a coach, you can ask those challenging questions. You can ask yourself those challenging questions. They’re not always comfortable that unpleasantness sometimes is a thing that can drive you to change. So yeah, I think that that’s how you could start to separate some of those things out, I think.

Dr. Cooper

Okay, good. Excellent, excellent. Loving this. What are some of the things that surprised you in your career as a human performance researcher? What did you come across where you went wait, what?

Dr. Jones

Do you know, I think that the biggest one, which is, it seems so obvious now when we look at it is in the last two years, I’ve really kind of had a deep dive into sleep and fatigue. Cause I’ve been doing a lot, lots of sleep work, in mostly in kind of in the defense sector and met a lot of people who work in sleep research and talk to some, you know, real world leading experts. And, you know, you sat there talking to them and I kind of sat there thinking, why have I never, why have I never done this before? Why haven’t I ever, sleep is so obvious that it’s something we spend a third of our lives doing, for the most part. Everybody pretty much recognizes when they’ve had a good sleep that, you know, you can think, you know, how great it feels when you’ve had a really good sleep that equally, if you’ve ever traveled across a time zone, you know, how bad you feel with jet lag or, you know, I’ve got two young kids and when they, when they keep you awake and I was camping at the weekend and I’ve got maybe three hours sleep, with my two year old and my six year old, you know, and you feel terrible the next day. That that’s the biggest light bulb moment where I thought this is so obvious that your ability to get adequate sleep first and foremost is so important.

Dr. Jones

And it explains so many of my own experiences like, Oh, why didn’t I perform well that day? And then you kind of think, well, actually, yeah, it’s because I was up all night cramming for an exam or, you know, I just, I was in a different bed and it wasn’t comfortable. So that’s the big thing for me is that I can’t believe there’s not more research on sleep in human performance. It’s quite a niche area. And, you know, we know it affects mood we know it affects you in terms of cognitive abilities, your reaction time, vigilance, executive functions, and then your emotional regulation. You know, you feel typically people feel irritable when they’ve not slept in a less sort of optimistic, less, less driven. And that’s the big, the big surprise is that there isn’t more of it. And that it surprises me that I’d never call on those, it took me 36 years.

Dr. Cooper

It took the world. Yeah. I mean, it used to be a badge of honor. Oh yeah, I only need four hours of sleep. Well, yeah, if you want to perform at 60%, that’s fine.

Dr. Jones

Yeah. I mean, there is, you know, don’t get me wrong in the military, there is some training that happens where people are sleep deprived and sure enough, they won’t learn as well. But that’s kind of not the point, in that environment where sleep deprivation is, it is part of the job. There’s no getting around it in a training when sleep deprived allows that individual to recognize the point when they are getting sleep deprived. So there is, there is value to it in some respects, but yet to use it as a, as a badge of honor, I think is crazy. And, you know, I look at my own experience as a student and I, and then my 10 years working in higher education, you know, those students who, who do wear it as a badge of honor. Yeah, you know, I was up all night, cramming, you know, I managed to do my last essay, I just didn’t sleep for 48 hours. And then I, you know, I’m looking back and thinking, well, yeah, sure enough. I can tell because you didn’t do well on the exam because you’ve not recalled any information because you were sleep deprived. So that’s the big one that I just can’t believe it seems to take so long. I mean, I’m talking to, I did, I started a sports science degree in 2000, so 20 years ago is when I, when I started my university education, I didn’t do anything with sleep, no instinct into studying it. I did plenty of sleep sometimes in the back of the lectures, but no, I never studied sleep. And then I did a master’s degree. Never studied sleep. Did a PhD, never studied sleep. Postdoctoral work never came into it. It was only when I moved out of academia into defense that it became, it came onto the radar. And I thought, yeah, this is really, really important.

Dr. Cooper

Yeah. Excellent, good, great example. So now looking forward, what are some of the advances you see around the bend that folks should be tuning into? Maybe you’ve seen them, but the general population really, it hasn’t bubbled up to the top yet in terms of human performance.

Dr. Jones

Yeah. There’s this, there’s some really interesting science moving forward. I think there’s, you know, we can look at just technologies and, you know, things like understanding the human genome and the connections in the brain. And we know there’s a lot of individual variability and a lot of these, the skills and the performance States. And I think we are starting to understand them. And we are starting to find ways of can we augment human performance by other technology. So things like that, you know, the vagus nerve stimulation, you know, I was reading the paper about that earlier. I don’t think the technology’s there right now, but you know, it probably will be within a short period of time. You know, can we change the metabolism of the brain? Can we, are we at a place where we can use that science to change how we think?

Dr. Jones

And I think right now we probably can’t. And I think there’s a lot of, technology which is missold, which suggests that people try and buy these things because they think it can work. The theory is sometimes valuable and is worthy, but the technology isn’t quite there yet, but I think within the next 20 to 30, maybe even 50 years, I think we will start to see some of these technologies come through in a sporting context. The question then is if we put an electrode, we can put it on the skin of the temple, is that any different than someone taking EPO and are we now moving into a neuro doping, that sort of thing. But I think we, we definitely can. The caveat to that is I think there’s the assumption that people are operating at 98% already. And if we give them that new technology, that headband, that can synchronize their brainwaves, that’s going to get them to a hundred percent. And I think the reality is most people are currently operating at maybe 60%. Actually there’s loads of things that we can do in lieu of that technology. We can make sure that people are healthy, you know, you’re not going to run a three hour marathon if you’re pre-diabetic and you know, you’re overweight or you’re smoking. So we need to get, we need to get people up to that level. Then we can look at human performance.

Dr. Cooper

Right, get the cornerstones first.

Dr. Jones

Yeah. If someone’s sleep deprived, they’ve got a sleep disorder, we need to go to someone who’s a sleep medic, and we can treat that sleep disorder. And then we can look at human performance on top of that so that we can, if we can get people those cornerstones set first, and then we can think about human performance, but even so, you know, a really good, solid diet, I’m not a nutritionist, but a food first approach. I think it makes sense to me as a non nutritionist that if we can get the nutrients that you need in a good rounded diet then supplementation, I think it makes sense that you could do it through food. But, you know, as I said I’m not a nutritionist, so there might be counter arguments to that. But yeah, a good, solid diet, good sleep, you know, looking after your mental fitness, which I think is part of that idea of that, just an audit of yourself, journaling, reflective activity, clearing out the file drawer. It’s like your brain is full of stuff and every now and then you need to clean the office. You need to, you need to go through it and you need to clean out. And I think those sorts of things, if we focus on those, your performance is probably going to go up and I’m not just talking about sport, you know, your performance in life will improve. This is long before you get the, you know, the fancy headband that can somehow influence your brain waves. There’s lots we can do right now.

Dr. Cooper

I think that’s such a great reminder. We just did a feature video on that topic that doggone it, stop messing with the little tiny things that make a 0.5% difference when you haven’t addressed the thing that makes a 12% difference. Come on, folks. It comes back to move, fuel, rest, connect. It’s those cornerstones. So, yeah, well done.

Dr. Jones

Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. I’m a scientist and I love the data and, you know, I wear it, I wear a smartwatch and it gives me all the data and I use it every day and I love it. And, you know, the device that I use, there’s little add ons that you can buy, and I was looking at one the other day, and it gives you all this data about your running, you know, your running technique. It gives you like how much is on your left and your right foot.

Dr. Cooper

Oh yeah, I’ve used that.

Dr. Jones

And I’m like I’m going to buy this, I’m going to buy this. And then I thought, actually, there’s so much more I can do today to make me a better runner.

Dr. Cooper

I need to run more.

Dr. Jones

Yeah. Yeah. I could just time on foot, getting out, you know, just, just that, that will make me a better runner before I have to go and spend a hundred pounds on a device that, there’s lots of things that are in our control right now that we can do to improve our performance, that we don’t, that we don’t have to shell out. We don’t have to buy the latest technology or often we just need to look at what we currently have and then say, right, what do I have at my disposal that I am, that I am not currently leveraging, that I’m not using efficiently. And can I, can I make those tweaks first? And you know, your performance will go up. It’s almost guaranteed.

Dr. Cooper

Great reminder. All right. Let’s flip the mirror around a little bit. How about your own life? Are there certain strategies, you’re telling us all this great stuff that we can be doing. Is there something that in your life right now, you’ve been struggling, not something you’ve mastered. Don’t, don’t tell us how, you know, this worked great last month, but one that you’re kind of like, you know what, I’m kind of struggling in this area, but here’s a technique I’m starting to use and I’m optimistic it’s going to make a difference.

Dr. Jones

You know, me Brad, I’m far from perfect. So, I’m a huge believer in the power of education. And I’m constantly trying to learn, I don’t know, I’m trying, I’m always, um, not wanting to be overly dramatic, but I am literally always trying to learn something. So if I’m walking to a train station, I’ve got a podcast or an audio book, um, you know, I love a lot of documentaries and I’m trying to learn stuff. And I think it comes back to, I think Aristotle said, you know, education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity. And I think, I really believe that the education, you know, when you, when you’re in those dips, that having knowledge and spending time to learn means, you might not use it at that point in time, but, but there often will be times when it’s useful and you, you know, you’re stocking the shelves of, of knowledge and education. So that down the line, you’ve got something to use. So that, that’s what I do. I spend, I spend my days just trying to, just trying to gather information and I love talking to people. Oh yeah, I get the most information, the best education for me is in conversation with other people. So yeah. I love reaching out to people and spending time learning from, from other people and not just people who share your own opinion. I think it’s good to be challenged. It’s good to look at different ways of thinking. We don’t have to agree with them, but it’s, it’s really useful to listen to other people and, and try and develop yourself that way. So, yeah, no, right now, probably not the fittest I’ve been, um, I’m not as physically active as I probably would like to be. So yeah, a lot of that, a lot of the stuff I’m listening to is, and learning about is like, you know, what can I do to get to that place that I want to be to, to be more physically active, then, you know, a good role model to my kids.

Dr. Jones

And the education that I’ve had over the years has helped me recognize, for example, the stages of change. What, what stage are you in? You know, what’s the value of taking the stairs versus the lift? You know, I’ve studied that sort of stuff. As a postgraduate student, you know, it has a knock on effect, you know, 10, 15 years after, after studying exercise psychology, I’d still always take the stairs if they’re available to me. So it’s influenced my behavior 15 years later, before that I probably would have taken the lift. It was that education, which, which really stimulated that behavior change for me. So I think that’s, that’s the big thing it’s, it’s learning, it’s understanding, you know, we, we can always come back to that goal setting example, a lot of people know the smart acronym and they will use the smart acronym, the nuts and bolts of goal setting goes so much deeper than that. And I think educating yourself and learning more about that, those, those skills allows you to be that detective and allows you to, because you understand, and you’ve learned it, it allows you to pick those, those experiences apart. I think that it comes down to, you know, education for me is it’s changing the way that you think it’s changing the way that you see the world and your place within the world. So it’s not just about reading books and, and, and retaining information it’s fundamentally changing how you interact with your environment. And, yeah, that’s the big one for me, just learn, learn as much as you can, stand on the shoulders of giants as it were, you know, those great authors, you might not write the great book, but you can certainly stand on their shoulders and, you know, apply those great words.

Dr. Cooper

Love it. Last question. Final words of wisdom. Just wide open, something we haven’t covered, anything for coaches trying to help their clients, or maybe folks listening that are trying to help their friends, family members, their kids, anything in the terms of this human performance that we just, I’ve missed with the questions I’ve asked you.

Dr. Jones

I think maybe to reiterate something that we’ve talked about now, I think it’s a relationship endeavor. Human performance is, I don’t know of anyone that can perform to their best in isolation. I think that you are with people that even, you know, you’ve got the gold medalist, they’ve got support team, they’ve got a family, they’ve got parents who, who helped them as they were coming through that. Everyone it’s, it’s a, it’s a social experience. And I think that my biggest achievements in life, you know, I always think, you know, I haven’t done that on my own that I couldn’t have got to that position without hundreds of people who’ve helped me along the way. And I think that that’s where, you know, reaching out, reaching out to people, both in person, talking to people who are close to you, but, you know, reaching out to people through reading their words and listening to their podcasts. And you know, it doesn’t have to be a reciprocal conversation. You can, you can learn from other people in different ways and really do believe that that’s the key to success. If, if you ever want to be that grandiose, but yeah, just working with other people and, you know, I think those relationships are key. And if you, if you, if you can build those really strong relationships, you, you find that great things happen.

Dr. Cooper

So good. So good. This was fantastic. I obviously, I knew this is gonna be fantastic. I’ve known you for years. You’ve had a big, big impact on my life. What’s the best way for folks to follow you on Instagram, Twitter? What’s your preference with that?

Dr. Jones

Uh, yes. So, I’m on both. So I’m on Twitter. It’s DrMIJones, um, on Instagram, there’s a, there’s a more recent Instagram it’s just called OpHumanPerformance. So yeah, you can follow me there. Um, yeah, just reach out, ask questions. I’m happy to answer them.

Dr. Cooper

Perfect. Thank you so much. This is fantastic.

Dr. Jones

Great. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot, Brad.

Dr. Cooper

Well, now you can see why my time as a PhD student was so valuable can’t you? Thank you again to Dr. Martin Jones, and thank you to you for tuning into the number one podcast for health and wellness coaching and an extra thank you to those of you who shared it with others. Next weeks, guest is Dr. Andrew Miller, the author of the fascinating book titled On Not Being Someone Else. It was one of my favorite conversations, and I think you’ll really enjoy it. If you’re a subscriber over at the YouTube coaching channel, which you can find at youtube.com/coachingchannel, we’d love your suggestions. What topics do you want us to cover? We recently published our 60th video and we’ve designed some specific playlists. So if you’re looking for something like things on coaching tools, or human performance, or the business of coaching, you can access that series without having to look through all 60. But in terms of topics, this is your chance to nudge us into providing what information you want without you having to spend a dime. Now it’s our chance to move toward better than yesterday with a fresh batch of ideas and application, but it’s up to us to put them into practice starting right now. This is Dr. Bradford Cooper of the Catalyst Coaching Institute signing off, make it a great rest of your week and I’ll speak with you soon on the next episode of the Catalyst Health, Wellness, and Performance coaching podcast. Or on the new YouTube coaching channel.