Athlete CEO

We love being a part of a community that is driven to win. A community where each of us are in pursuit of being the best in the world. To be masters of our craft. 

Many begin the journey, but few arrive. It can be lonely, exhausting and filled with dangerous pitfalls that threaten your success.

The biggest threat, your mental health. 

Thankfully, this is not a path you have to travel alone. From Michael Phelps, to Kevin Love and Hayden Hurst we have professional athletes bringing the awareness and resources to the forefront to help us redefine what high performance truly means. 

Listen in to this Athlete CEO Episode with special guest, Jason Law as we dive into bringing you the knowledge, tools and experts surrounding mental health.

It’s been estimated that the human mind is capturing anywhere between 10,000-60,000 thoughts per day, and that we scroll somewhere in the range of the Statue of Liberty’s to the Eiffel Tower’s height per day.

We are inundated with information every day – how do you capture what’s most important to unlock your full human capital?

By utilizing one of the most pivotal tools of performance: journaling.

Through the frontal lobe, the brain has a built-in functionality to sift through the proverbial firehose of information we’re consuming throughout our days and makes executive decisions on what to store and what to sift out, so a constant barrage of information can actually tax the performance of that function. 

So as Josiah puts it, “you cannot use what you can’t access.”

With the habit of journaling, we unlock the ability to note the most important points from that recent book we’ve read, performance notes from our last training session, map out our big goals, and it even helps us address stress and anxiety.

Our resident performance coach and founder of All Things Performance, Josiah Igono, joins Erik once again to discuss this topic and how to implement it in our lives to improve our performance in all areas of life.

Episode Highlights

• Stats of the daily firehose of information (1:34)
• How journaling helps us use the information we gather daily to actually become actionable (4:07)
• “You cannot use what you cannot access” – Josiah Igono (5:47)
• How journaling helps us set goals and find clarity (8:27)
• How journaling can help with stress and anxiety (11:47)
• “A listening ear has a healing quality” – Josiah Igono (12:12)
• What is stream-of-consciousness journaling? (13:02)

On today’s episode, Phil Wallin, owner & CEO of Diesel Fitness & Health & Recovery shares how the revolution of wearable technology such as the Whoop is fueling performance like never before. 

The world of sports and investing is driven by analytics because the numbers don’t lie. Analytics provide answers to the most important questions: 

1. What is valuable?
2. What drives performance?
3. Can it be improved?

Our community is constantly looking for the next edge. Yet, the one thing we have control over is still the most untapped: our human performance. 

For the professional athlete, it is so important that your bank account is tied directly to your physical performance. 

Yet, most athletes are still guessing when it comes to their health & performance.

“If you are not wearing, you are guessing. If you don’t understand the data, we can teach you. Is your career not important enough?” – Phil Wallin

Listen in as Phil breaks down the 3 Pillars of Health & Performance and the technology you need to gain the edge you are looking for. 

The difference between a good performance and a great performance is the result of how you show up.

Are you at your absolute best? Have you set yourself up for peak performance?

Very few of the mental skills are designed to help us up-regulate. Most of the skills are focused on slowing down, being present, and calming yourself.

But, what if you could wake yourself up, become hyper-focused, and create an edge at the right moment?

Listen in as Josiah Igono, PHD Performance Psychology unlocks the powerful skill of Arousal Regulation.

Episode Highlights

• (01:24): What is Arousal Regulation
• (03:46): What is Catastrophe Theory
• (04:21): 4 Tactics to upregulate
• (08:28): The Danger of Stoicism
• (08:55): How to spike your HRV
• (09:45): When to use Arousal Regulation
• (11:34): What does it mean to be fully human?
• (12:27): The importance of individualization
• (14:40): Owning your development and performance

More resources at awmcap.co/aceo50

Your presence is everything – it dictates your performance, how you’re viewed, how other respond to you, and even how you feel about yourself.

Our brains are wired to protect and to predict, so the way we comport ourselves – whether it’s on the mound, in the boardroom, or in daily interactions – makes a difference in how others will respond, think, and feel.

As athletes, the truth is that we want to have a dominant presence on the field. We want to be confident and take up space. We want to be big. This comes from a confidence that you can actually do what you set out to do – beat your opponent and win.

Ultimately, as Josiah shares in this episode, confidence begins by adopting championship body language as there is a measurable reaction occurring at a neurochemical level. In today’s episode, Josiah and Erik discuss this concept and the science that ties confidence and body language together.

Episode Highlights

• (1:12) What is championship body language?
• (2:21) The science behind presence
• (3:33) The difference between having a strong presence and being domineering
• (5:28) Being a dominant athlete
• (6:37) Your reaction as an athlete to committing an error on the field
• (9:50) Where to find the best research on body language
• (10:49) Having confidence in your teammates and coaches
• (15:09) Is it in you?

As an elite performer you’ve worked hard to get where you’re at. The work to stay at the top comes with immense pressure and a grind to continually improve. Also, success can make it hard to get clear, direct feedback, and it can attract people who don’t have your best interests in mind.

How do you continue to reach for greatness without folding to the pressures of perfectionism? How can you work to build an inner circle of people with your best interests in mind – who can give you direct and candid feedback that will help you get better at what you do?

Today we’re joined by Darleen Santore – also known as Coach Dar. She is a board-certified occupational therapist, business owner, and performance coach for professional athletes and executives.

Coach Dar was recently named a senior fellow at PathNorth, an organization comprised of leaders and CEOs of fortune 100 companies, the WNBA named her the Most Inspiring Woman of 2017, she is the U.S. Ambassador for Pay It Forward Day, and she recently launched her own social platform called Kindli, which puts the focus squarely on kindness and positivity with a goal to generate over a billion acts of kindness around the world.

Coach Dar discusses with Erik and Brandon about how to define greatness, what it means to be a pro, dealing with the pressures of perfection, and surrounding yourself with people who will help you grow.

Episode Highlights

• (00:08) More about Coach Dar
• "The thing about greatness and being great, everyone has the ability to reach greatness within them with the God-given talent they have, but few are willing to truly do what it takes to be that truest and best version of themselves." – Coach Dar
• (4:22) How to define greatness
• (5:14) “Being a pro does not mean perfection. It means 1% progress. Every day you’re back – being consistent and disciplined to do what you need to do to be the best.” – Coach Dar
• (5:49) What holds people back from greatness? 
• (7:36) What are the practical steps to committing to the process and implementing a plan
• (9:42) Finding the right help
• (11:49) The science of occupational therapy
• (18:27) Why aren’t people working with performance coaches?
• (20:25) How Tom Brady and LeBron James got where they are
• (21:09) Why working with a peak performance coach doesn’t mean something is wrong with you
• (24:00) Dealing with the pressure of perfection
• (26:11) “I'm going to help you find your whypower over willpower. Your willpower is going to give up when you're going through a tough season, right? You can't lean on willpower every day, but I'm going to remind you - why'd you get up?” – Coach Dar
• (27:27) The importance of reframing
• (30:06) Getting direct feedback
• (32:52) Building your trusted inner circle
• (38:32) Cutting down your circle
• (41:35) One of the key questions to ask in close relationships

Do You Spend More Time In Reflection or Strategy? | Josiah Igono, Erik Averill | Athlete CEO: Peak Performance

Living in an “always on” and “permanently connected” world, our everyday experience is littered with a proverbial fire hose of information. We can get any question answered in the blink of an eye on Google, learn how to build a house on YouTube, and keep up with the daily activities of our friends and family on apps like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or TikTok.

It can be overwhelming to sort through this information overload to actually learn something, and even more daunting to carve out space to reflect and grow in this age of constant noise.

We return again this week with another Peak Performance edition of the Athlete CEO podcast with Josiah Igono, founder of All Things Performance. Our Peak Performance episodes with Josiah are all about helping you develop skills that will drive your human capital and performance, as well as help you achieve the life you envisioned.

In this episode, Erik and Josiah look at this problem of improving, growing, and learning in an era of information overload by discussing the importance of reflection, the questions to ask yourself while reflecting, and how practicing this skill set can improve our overall performance trajectory.

Episode Highlights

• (00:57) What is reflection?
• (1:49) Do you spend more time in reflection or in strategy?
• “One of the interview questions that I would always ask was, ‘do you spend more time in reflection or in strategy?’” - Josiah Igono
• “Reflection is the mental review” – Josiah Igono
• (3:07) Drowning in information overload
• (4:41) The differences between reflection and strategy
• (5:17) The questions for reflection
• (6:44) Reflection is not Mindfulness
• (8:13) How a cow chewing is similar to reflecting throughout your day
• (10:47) What are tangible ways to build the habit of reflecting?
• “Clumsiness is actually a sign of growth” – Josiah Igono
• (13:18) How toddlers are actually better than us at approaching new tasks
• (14:57) The scientific benefits of journaling

It’s often said, “it’s lonely at the top.”

As venture capitalists, business executives, and professional athletes at the highest level, there can often be a mentality that you should just focus on performing and avoid feelings of burn out, toxic stress, or loneliness. 

However, we’ve all seen examples of - or felt ourselves - this mentality not being sustainable over the long term.

In this episode of the Athlete CEO, Erik is joined by Andy Maurer, licensed therapist and emotional wellness coach specializing in leadership, trauma and emotional health. Andy utilizes cutting edge clinical research paired with therapeutic best practices and strategies to help high performance leaders - including CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs - operate at a higher caliber and in healthy and sustainable ways.

Erik and Andy discuss pursuing wholeness and avoiding fragmentation while leading and give practical steps to starting work on your inner game.

Episode Highlights

• 95% of cognition happens at the subconscious level (2:33)
• Can we overcome our subconscious? (3:40)
• Two kinds of processing (4:13)
• Logic vs Emotion (5:29)
• Demystifying “emotional wellness” (7:31)
• “With emotional wellness coaching, what I'm really trying to get across is I'm trying to help people live an integrated whole life as a leader. So, I focus a lot less on how to get rid of problems and I focus more on how to bring about something in the leader's life. Oftentimes, I see that they're fragmented, they're disjointed, they're lost internally, they don't know what they feel, they don't know who they are in a lot of ways, and my job is to help them reclaim that or rediscover that.” – Andy Maurer
• The difference between therapy and emotional wellness (9:37)
• The stats on entrepreneurs (12:17)
• The big issue that the top business editorials miss (12:45)
• The external vs internal (13:16)
• Fears about addressing your inner game (17:06)
• Defining “wholeness” (18:57)
• Battling imposter syndrome (23:43)
• Tools and tactics in pursuing wholeness (26:12)
• How burnout happens (28:44)
• When dialing in fitness and nutrition isn’t enough (29:53)
• Taking first steps toward emotional wellness (31:57)
• Practicing reflection (36:53)
• The impacts of toxic stress (42:45)
• How the body deals with stress (46:06)

Resources

• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
• Anatomy of the Soul by Curt Thompson
• Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett

How can some players overcome mental hurdles and self-doubt to hit that game winning home run, make that difficult catch, or sink the perfect putt? Why do we see so many first-round draft picks ending up a bust? 

At AWM Capital, we believe one of the greatest drivers of your wealth is your human capital and one of the goals of the Athlete CEO podcast is to help you learn new ways of tapping into your full potential. That's why each month we’re joined by Josiah Igono, Ph.D. of Performance Psychology and founder of All Things Performance for our Peak Performance edition of the podcast to discuss concepts and tactics to help us improve our performance in all areas of our life. 

In this episode, Josiah and Erik discuss how we can redirect our words and emotions to improve performance through a practice called reframing. Josiah shares the science behind reframing, the power of hearing your own voice, and achieving one of the major keys to success: self-awareness. 

Episode Highlights

• What is reframing? (1:38)
• How is this different than just “think happy thoughts”? (2:52)
• Finding what you can do vs what you can’t do (4:32)
• The power of your voice (5:42)
• Don’t lie to yourself (7:30)
• Defining psychology (8:00)
• Evaluating your current frame (9:45)
• The importance of self-awareness (11:01)
• “Everything boils down to self-awareness. Once you become self-aware, that is when change can happen because you know now that the problem exists.” – Josiah Igono
•  Insightfulness during COVID (13:14)
• “I think that reverts back to your previous conversations: clarity, who do I actually want to become? Who do I want to be? How do I want other people, not to perceive me so that I can have some facade or to attain approval, but to genuinely have healthy relationships? How do I do that?” – Erik Averill
• The limbic system response (15:08)
• “When you look at an individual and you see their performance, you see how they live. It's like seeing an apple or a fruit on a tree. When you see an apple or a piece of fruit hanging on a tree, that is not telling the full story. The full story is the root system, right? What is the root system? The root system can be things like beliefs. It can be things like memories, reactions, actions. It can be words. It can be memories. These things all feed into the trunk of that tree.” – Josiah Igono
• Modeling during childhood development and its impact today (16:46)

Resources Mentioned

• Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett, Ph.D.
• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
• Tactical Field Manual by Josiah Igono

“2020 was a little crazy.”

That is the understatement of the year.

A global pandemic, volatile markets, athletic seasons paused then modified. Many companies who had set their “20/20 in 2020” vision campaigns ended up having to scrap much of their planning and pivot in what looks to be a new normal moving into 2021.

Yet despite the volatility, AWM Capital, as Managing Partner Brandon Averill puts it, has “grown from an organization to a company.”

In this episode of the Athlete CEO, we get the opportunity to turn the focus around to the two who typically ask the questions – Erik Averill, CFP®, CPWA®, CKA® and Brandon Averill, CFP®, CPWA®, CIPM.

As two of AWM’s three co-founders, Erik and Brandon look back on 2020 – the lessons learned, challenges navigated, and vision for the company as we move into 2021 and beyond – and share some of the best practices they’ve picked up along the way as business founders and operators.

Episode Highlights

• Year in review (00:15)
• Summing up the year for AWM Capital (1:23)
• Growing from an organization to a company (2:37)
• Making the decision to go all in (3:31)
• Building a company that outlasts its founders (5:14)
• “Hire on culture, fire on culture” (6:26)
• Defining and developing culture (7:08)
• Building the super-charged team bus (8:53)
• The passion to serve the client (10:48)
• Knowledge vs Expertise (13:24)
• “If you waste wealth, all you’re doing is wasting impact.” – Brandon Averill
• Refinement over the long term (16:13)
• “The truth is if you have multi-generational visions and timeframes, you can out perform. You can make an impact.” – Erik Averill
• Leading teams through challenging times (18:26)
• Always learning and developing (22:20)
• Thinking about agility and adaptability (24:11)
• Reimagining the family office (27:23)
• AWM’s 2021 vision (28:20)

Resources Mentioned:

• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't
• No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
• Miracle (2004 movie)
• Tim Ferriss Podcast: Harley Finkelstein – Tactics and Strategies from Shopify, the Future of Retail, and More (#486)