How Top Performers Train their Minds to Win, w/ Dr. Glenn Fox of USC’s Performance Science Institute

When we think about training for high performance, we usually think about training our bodies. We might even think about working our craft. But how often do we consider training our emotions? Not very often, right? Well, if we care about performance, that’s actually a huge mistake. That’s a big part of we explore in this episode with Dr. Glenn Fox. Dr. Fox leads program design at USC’s Performance Science Institute, where he works with top athletes to devise strategies that optimize their abilities. He’s an expert on the ways that emotions - particularly gratitude and optimism - drive performance. According to his research, the ability to regulate emotions is the number one predictor of success in life. This is just as true in the workplace as anywhere else. Since gratitude and optimism affect performance, companies who proactively foster these positive emotions via a culture of recognition have an automatic leg-up on those who don’t. In this presentation, Dr. Glenn gives us a functional definition of optimism and gratitude that you can use at your workplace (it’s not just rosy thinking and pretending everything is great) provides the 3 core components of a Competitor’s Mindset and walks us through a visualization strategy that top athletes often use, and that we can use in our own lives too. Links Dr. Glenn Fox - bio and publications  The Empiricist Blog USC Performance Science Institute Recommended Reading Peak: Secrets of New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck