The Mental Game Architect: Why Smart Athletes Struggle in the Storm with Andrew Pardy

Matt Cundill  00:00

This is the mental approach, where we discuss mindfulness, mental performance, and the tools available for coping in a high-performance world. Here's Todd Arkell.

Todd Arkell  00:12

Welcome to The Mental Approach. I'm your host, Todd Arkell. Picture a skilled young athlete, talented enough to be one of the best in the room, the moment matters. The big game, the tournament, the college scout in the stands. Something turns, mind speeds up, the mistakes pile on each other. The kid who looked unstoppable in practice suddenly can't get out of his own head. Every parent of a competitive teenager knows that athlete. A lot of you are raising those athletes, and quite a few of you are that athlete, even if you don't recognize it yet. My guest today has built his entire career on a single idea: skills are physical, but consistent performance is mental. His name is Andrew Pardy. He's the founder of Self Aware Athlete, and a man who calls himself the mental game architect. For more than a decade, he's worked with elite teenage athletes around the world, some as young as 13, across hockey, baseball, basketball, other sports, you name it. He's a consultant to professional and college programs, and a global leader in something most people have never heard of: sports psychometric assessment. I can't believe I said that right. In plain terms, he measures the invisible building blocks of performance, finds there one or two that are out of balance, and helps an athlete unlock a level they didn't know they had. But here's what makes him different. Andrew doesn't believe your kid is missing anything. He believes they already have everything they need. The work, as he puts it, is a process of self-discovery, and what comes out the other side isn't just a better athlete, it's a more self-aware human being. Andrew, welcome to the show.

 

Andrew Pardy  01:46

Thanks very much, Todd. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

 

Todd Arkell  01:49

Yeah, no, it's awesome, and you know what, I, you've been on my list for a while, and it's just, you know, get around to doing all that outreach. So I'm glad, I'm glad we could get these settled. So let's jump right in, so you know some of the things in my research, you know, you say an athlete has everything they need to perform at a higher level. Walk us through what that belief actually means in practice, and how you kind of deal with that.

 

Andrew Pardy  02:14

Yeah, so wow, that's a, that's a big one to start. So I mean, I've worked with a little over 1000 athletes. Now, the way I do this, it's always one on one. I find it has to be one on one, because every athlete's unique, you know, the way forward, which is often foggy for athletes at various points in their careers. It's individual and unique, so there really is no one size fits all answer to the puzzle here, and I think that's where a lot of people get, get tripped up, they're trying one size fits all solutions, and that might get them half a step ahead, or maybe a step ahead, but then the road gets foggy again, so what I found to be very successful is you can really take a lot of the guesswork out of this, you can make things pretty quick and easy just by using psychometrics to measure individual performance psychology, and that really kind of puts a floodlight on an individual's performance psychology, and once you've got a roadmap from there, it's actually pretty easy to identify specific. The way I, the way I look at this, Todd, everybody is got - they've got individual self-sabotaging patterns that are playing out underneath the surface that they don't wheel

 

Todd Arkell  03:40

you all,

 

Andrew Pardy  03:43

so you know, step one is to understand that that's happening, and that kind of gets you to the dance, and then step two is to figure out exactly what they are, and then you're miles ahead, and then the third step is really to do something about it to figure out how to leverage that information, and that's that, that part's a practice, a lifetime practice, but you know what I found in my practice is floodlights go on once we measure everything, and motivation goes up, because all of a sudden now you know what's standing in the way, you can, you can put your finger on it, you can put a name on it, you can craft a plan, and from there you just execute the plan, and what you'll see is confidence, consistency, performance will just go to another level. From there,

 

Todd Arkell  04:36

was there a specific moment that made you believe that this was kind of the, you know, your philosophy, and moving forward was there something that kind of the light clicked, and you said, "Hey, this is this is I'm on to something, this is the right right path forward.

 

Andrew Pardy  04:50

Yeah, for sure. I, you know, this was back in a prior lifetime, but I used to do executive recruiting in the financial space, so. I'm actually an MBA and a CFA charter holder, and I started to do executive recruiting for pension funds and that sort of thing, and in that line of work I met a gentleman who became a mentor, so a gentleman called Dr. Robert Niederfer, so somebody who's been Bob was the first world's first celebrity sports psychologist, was actually on Johnny, Johnny Carson back in the day. If I don't know if your listeners know the name Johnny Carson, but

 

Todd Arkell  05:32

some of them might be, but that is a way back machine, that is

 

Andrew Pardy  05:36

a way back machine, that's, I guess, the predecessor of Jay Leno, the predecessor of Conan O'Brien. I don't know who the present day guys are. Jimmy Fallon, I guess.

 

Todd Arkell  05:48

Yeah, I think so.

 

Andrew Pardy  05:50

But anyway, I started using assessment tools in the corporate context, and so Bob designed some tools that he actually started working, was working with the elite military Navy Seals, Delta Force, pro sports teams, Olympic programs. So he had a tool that he developed, and I had the pleasure of working with him and learning that tool. And then it had a corporate context, which is where I got into it and started using it there, and that was where it was really a wow factor, because I could use it to really pinpoint what was going to work from a psychological perspective, if I was helping a pension fund hire a CFO, or something like that. From there, as a college athlete myself, university athlete, I knew that Bob and some other of my mentors were using that tool in an athletic context, so I just naturally started to gravitate toward that and started using it in the world of major junior hockey, and it just kind of exploded from there, because I think what I discovered in hockey was there's just not a lot of attention on mental health or mental performance, or and it's the school of hard knocks, so I just started using the tool there, and it just, it found a home, and, and I guess the rest is history.

 

Todd Arkell  07:11

Yeah, I'd agree with you. I mean, I think that was between the sport of baseball and the sport of hockey, was probably the impetus for the show, in that I saw so many athletes that parents were very invested in spending 1000s of dollars on skill sessions and nothing on their, their, their son's mental, I guess, mental health, but mental performance, being able to deal with things, I mean, I talk about it often, and I don't beat a dead horse. The professionalism of youth sports, you know, all the way down to 8u triple A, and you know you're gonna have a paid coach, and everybody shows up in a suit and tie, and it's like it's still just a game, everyone, and it puts a lot of pressure on kids at a very young age to to act like a grown up or like a pro without having any sort of basis on how to deal with that, like why is this guy yelling at me, you know, we all make mistakes, you know, it's it is one of those things, and I would see we billeted OHL hockey players and I would see the kids come back, and it'd be the coach loves me, the coach hates me, the coach loves me, the coach hates me, and they're always on this roller coaster, and you think you know, you kind of get to that level, and you think most of them would be fairly well adjusted, so it was kind of a light bulb moment for me, saying no, they're not, they're not well adjusted, and they're just kind of getting through, and nobody's given them the tools, so that's why there's people like you that do what you do. That's why this podcast was born, was really to be a be a beacon, or be some sort of flashlight to shine on the fact that you know, people need these, these types of services, they need people to help them navigate this from a young age, right. So, and we're going to talk about that too, about, you know, people always think, oh, you know, wait till they're older or whatever, but you know, I think the younger we can get to kids to help them navigate this, that the coach is yelling at you because it's a him problem, not a you problem in a lot of ways, so anyways, that's me, get off my soapbox, but so what's the difference between an athlete who's air quotes missing something and one who's just out of balance, like how do you know which, which one you're looking at?

 

Andrew Pardy  09:36

Yeah, I mean one thing I just want to, I just want to add on to what you just said there, I think the big, the big problem here is that we are assuming that a, you know, a 14 year old boy is a small man, but that, you know, that's just simply not the case, right? They, we're not, we're not dealing with a psychological foundation with a 14 year old boy. Is pretty much unformed, and you know, even a young man, the psychological foundation is unformed. So I think we're really wading into some, you know, some pretty shaky territory by starting to professionalize sports at a younger and younger and younger ages. It is a fool's errand that's fraught with problems, and I think a lot of those problems, I mean, the what, the way it shows up, the word that we use to describe a performance problem is confidence. Now, confidence means 100 different things to 100 different people, but that's the word we've got in vocabulary that we use to describe something's not, something's not quite right here, that the confidence is not there, and it's rarely confidence. The confidence is kind of like a symptom, rather than the, you know, rather than the problem. A lot of times, the problem is anxiety, and that makes a ton of sense, because we're treating, we're treating boys like men, and we are, you know we go with the example of hockey and a lot of sports are the same, but we've got the school of hard knocks and coaching, where it is, you know, you got grown men yelling at 14 year old boys, and there's just no real, you know, these days, there's just no way to contextualize that, and like you said, why, why am I, why am I being yelled at? And you know what, do I do with that? And you know, is this good, is this bad? So there's just a, there's a mountain of anxiety out there, and sports, where sports in my day used to be the place you'd go to alleviate anxiety, now it's place I think where you go to accumulate it,

 

Todd Arkell  11:42

yeah, that's that's a bit of a condemnation of the sport of sports, but yeah, I mean, I agree, I mean it, it's not broad based, but it is in a way, right, like it seems that there's more of it, especially in certain sports, definitely, definitely, hockey, which is a sport I love, and know lots of people working within the game, and you know a lot, a lot of really good people, but then there's also a lot of people that you probably shouldn't let near your kids.

 

Andrew Pardy  12:12

Yeah, I don't think it's a condemnation. I think sports is an amazing opportunity, it's, it's basically a metaphor for life, so I think sports provides us with an amazing opportunity to grow and develop our youth, but I think we just have to be very mindful and thoughtful and careful with how we're going about doing that, so it becomes a positive experience, and I'm not like I'm not saying it has to be a light and fluffy experience, either. It's not unicorns and popcorn, and you know it. There needs to be pressure, character is built in the storm, so you know there needs to be pressure to build that character. And when you get to the end of the line, if you're looking to get drafted, it's character gets drafted, it's not, it's not talent, it's not effort, it's it's character sold. I think the thing that we're not good at these days is how to be good in the storm.

 

Todd Arkell  13:12

If somebody looks it up, and this will probably be a few weeks out before we.. I always hate to date things by in the conversation, but just recently I saw Elliot Friedman ask John Tortorella a question, and he framed it up around the Knicks game, the Knicks Spurs in the NBA final, and a player making a huge mental error in a big spot, which left the door open in the Knicks winning the game in some unbelievable fashion, and he kind of drew that back, and Tortorella said, "You know, he goes, I don't know. He goes, "I see there's lots of people that are super intelligent players, and he said, "You know, I think sometimes you just get lost in the moment, and you make a mistake, right, because of the pressure, you know, maybe you make the situation bigger in your mind, you know, so interesting discussion, because that's really truthful. Here you have professionals, and you watch professional sports, and you go, How did that guy, why did he do that, right? I'm sure he didn't intend to, and that's part of sport, it happens, right? The pressure does get to different people, right, and it's how you deal with it, and how you can kind of, kind of, kind of navigate that. So, let's circle back to that question. So, what do you think is the difference between an athlete who's missing something and who might just be a little out of balance?

 

Andrew Pardy  14:33

I would say my philosophy is nobody's missing anything, everybody's got everything they need, it's a matter of balance, it's a matter of skill development, finding out where the imbalances are, and then customizing really a training program to get a player where they need to be on each of the measurable demands. Questions of of performance psychology, and I'd say there's a no, there's a science to this. Psychometrics is a well-established science. There's also an art to this. There's really the interpretation of the of the data that you'd gather from a psychometric tool or profile, that's the art. So you know, to answer your question more directly, you want to get the, you know, what I call the just the performance DNA profile in place, and what's really helpful again, if we, you know, we can have this conversation within the context of hockey. If I'm working with a hockey player, just to make this very practical, first thing I'll do when I bring a player into the program that I offer is I'll measure their performance psychology, and then I'll compare them to a benchmark of NHL players I've worked with, and then very quickly a picture starts to form in my mind of the strengths are, and typically there's a lot of strengths. There's usually a lot more strengths than weaknesses, but we don't succeed because of our strengths. We fail because of our weaknesses. So, we need to know what those weaknesses are. We need to know what those self-sabotaging patterns are, that you know, in Wendy's case, and the next Spurs game, to pass a ball into a player's back when there's five seconds left in the game, and so there's a, you know, maybe the best basketball player in the world, but something happened there because he was under pressure and something was operating inside him that he doesn't have any awareness of, and I think that's the, that's, that's the outcome,

 

Todd Arkell  16:39

100% fair, so can you give me a concrete example of maybe an intangible building block, and what that looks like in a, in a, in a kid?

 

Andrew Pardy  16:50

There's a couple of really big ones I think that I would, that I would point to, and a lot of the work that I do these days, Todd, is focused on attention. We live in the most attention-starved era in human history, and so we've got a lot of distraction, and we've got a lot of anxiety, and we've got a lot of instant gratification. Now, earlier I said that characters built in the storm, and what I find these days with a lot of the athletes I work with, they don't like the storm. The storm doesn't feel good, so when the storm arrives, they will, instead of feeling the difficult emotions that you need to feel to get good in the storm, that's what mental performance and sports is all about, being good in the storm again, not about talent or skill. It's about being able to find that talent and skill in the storm when you need it. I find what's happening now is as soon as the storm arrives, then what most teenagers do is pick up a screen and start to scroll, and that allows them to avoid the uncomfortable emotions that come along with being in the storm, so they don't get good in storm, and where that, where that shows up is under the, you know, under the framework of I do a lot of something called attention control training, and where that shows up is just a lot of distraction, and if an athlete's distracted, if they're not in control of their attention, then their attention is in control of them, and if their is in control of them in the storm, those self-sabotaging patterns that we're unaware of, they get life and play out, and that kills inconsistency, and if you're inconsistent as an athlete, it's real tough to be confident, so I'd say, you know, distraction is one of the big intangibles that my work on daily.

 

Todd Arkell  18:51

Yeah, we get a million diagnoses of ADHD when really it's Snapchat and Instagram, but anyways, we'll, that we could unpack that for another day, but yes, that's is definitely for sure. So, when you, when you, what's it, what's a balance that most people get backwards, where they think it might be a strength, but it's actually a problem.

 

Andrew Pardy  19:18

That's a great question. I think the obvious one there that jumps to mind is I find this ironic with student athletes. What we're looking for, especially at the college level, we're looking for intellectual, analytical, you know, athletes who are going to, you know, go to.. I had a kid, just hockey player, signed d1 Dartmouth, and you know the criteria is analytical, good grades, you know you want to go in there and knock it out of the park academically, and that's great. However, those analytical skills, the ones that you're using in math class, or can. History class, or whatever it might be, are not of a lot of value in a competitive arena. They actually get in the way, because to perform, to be consistent, really, it's about emptying the mind of thought. Mental content is the thing that's really going to get in the way. So I find that the great irony is that you know college recruiters are out there looking for the smart analytical kids, but those are the ones who are, they've got the biggest problem, performance problems on their hands, because that stuff gets in the way.

 

Todd Arkell  20:33

That's funny. Yeah, I could, I could see that you do an assessment with somebody when the data says one thing and the kid sitting in front of you says, another, what wins out, or is it a blend? Is that the art of it? I guess.

 

Andrew Pardy  20:47

Yeah, the thing about what I do, and I have also having a conversation with my right-hand man, Jeremy, the other day, who was kind of in disbelief that I told him, look, I've worked with over 1000 athletes, and I've never had a complaint. I've never had somebody say this is nonsense, or this doesn't work, or I didn't learn anything from you. I've never, I've never had that, and the reason I haven't had that is I work with amazing tools, and I had, I've had amazing mentors, and when I sit down with an athlete or a family, and I like to work with families here, because you know, performance is a, is a blend of your individual performance psychology and the context, and what you're, what you're operating, and your family is a massive part of that context. So I'll sit with a family with an assessment, and usually jaws drop, because I'm able to describe somebody's behavior in a great amount of detail, and probably the outcomes they're seeing on the field or on the ice, and so jaws drop, and you know, I kind of have instant credibility, because how could I know all of this? I don't, I don't really know the person that well, but I'm describing their behaviors in great detail, and that's kind of the arc. It's the arc built on the science of the tools I work with.

 

Todd Arkell  22:10

Gotcha. So, 1314, most people would say, ah, that's really young, you know. So, how do you adapt this for an adolescent brain versus say a college or a pro athlete, because there's obviously differences in their, in their mental development.

 

Andrew Pardy  22:28

Yeah, to be honest, if you look at the research, prefrontal cortex doesn't fully form until 2526 so believe it or not, difference between a 14 year old's DNA performance blueprint and an 18 year old's is not that it's not that much different. I mean, the 18 year olds got a little more experience under their belt, they got a little more maturity under their belt, they've they've messed it up a little bit more, they've had a little more pressure to deal with, so they're on a little bit more solid of a foundation. 12, 1314, this is where this need is acute, because these kids don't have a lot of life experience, they are in the school of hard knocks. It's very competitive, very early. It's not, you know, again, I go back to hockey, because I do a lot of work in hockey, but there's a lot of 12 year old kids out there who aren't having a ton of fun playing hockey. It's very serious, so they're up there under a lot of pressure, and it's way too early. They're not ready to manage or deal with that. So, to be honest with you, if they're going to get through that much pressure at that early of an agent, they need, they need support, they need tools, they need guidance, they need to understand what's actually going on around them, because a lot of them show up and say, I thought this was thought this was fun, don't get me wrong, it is fun, but it's a lot more than that

 

Todd Arkell  24:04

now. More of the mental approach with Todd Arkell. Where's the line between mental performance coaching and mental health treatment? Like, have you ever had athletes that have sort of, you might want to refer out to somebody to get, get, you know, some professional help as far as just dealing with certain things, could be deep anxiety, or whatever that

 

Andrew Pardy  24:26

is. Some of the pillars I work with, anxiety is definitely a big one. There's a couple different ways to look at anxiety. There's anxiety in the moment, which is more of a state that's a trainable state, how you know, go back to the storm analogy, that's character in the storm, and that's a skill, that easy way or the hard way, every athlete's going to need to get good at that, you know, there's the easy way is to, you know, I like to look at what I offer as the easy way, the hard way is messing it up. And over time, so there's there's state anxiety, there's trait anxiety, is another piece of the puzzle that's a measurable aspect of performance psychology. Another big piece of the puzzle that ties in your question directly is we can measure an individual's level of self criticality, and sadly I see a lot of extreme self criticality in student athletes. I find that shocking and sad. It's prevalent in common. What you'll see come along with that are high levels of anxiety, high levels of distraction. I'm looking for certain thresholds of self critical thought, and once I see an athlete who surpassed a certain level of self criticality from a statistical perspective, then I know it's time to, you know, we've got depression on our hands here, we've got, we've got something a little more serious going on. The

 

Todd Arkell  25:53

self critical kid who's stuck in his head or her head, what do you think's actually happening in there? I mean, from from your experience, and how do you, I mean, I mean, you mentioned it, I guess, looking at different scores to be able to intervene, and maybe you know, speak to the parents, or even the kid, about, hey, you know, we'd like to get, you know, I think there's somebody else that can help with this as well, but how do you diagnose that, really?

 

Andrew Pardy  26:17

I guess one of the things I see is the self-critical perfectionist, right? That's, that's a common, that's a common theme. And don't get me wrong, self-criticality. If you look at the average NHL player, are they self-critical? You better believe it. They have to be. That's an occupational hazard. You have to be self-critical, but that's just one of the one of the things that has to be kept in balance statistically, you want to talk numbers. The average NHL player sits in the 54th percentile of self criticality in the general population, so they're pretty self critical, but they are able to kind of keep a good perspective on it, or they've learned to keep a good perspective on it. 14 year old doesn't have any perspective or framework on self critical criticality that can really tip heavily into I'm not good enough, everybody's better than me. What am I even doing here? I'm going to quit. I think what is the foundation of all that, honestly, and I'll try not to get too philosophical with you here, but it is a dysfunctional relationship with your own mind, with your own mental content. Now we can dig into that if you want, but that is really the genesis of it, is you've got to have a healthy relationship with your own mind, and in North America, in general, we don't really have that, and in a sport where you're under pressure, that's a critical thing to have.

 

Todd Arkell  27:54

How can people start to kind of work through that, and athletes start to work through that thing at a very high level?

 

Andrew Pardy  28:00

Yeah, so I think the key to this is, I think it's critical to understand this if you want to be an elite athlete, and I don't know, it's probably critical if you don't. I think you've got a.. I can't remember who said this, but the longest journey in the world is the journey from your head to your heart, and in North American Western cultures, like I say, we were very heady, we're very left brain, we're very analytical. We value that, that's who we want to, you know, who we recruit as our d1 hockey players or d1 basketball players. We, so we over value the left brain, the thinking part of the mind, that's the part that gets in the way of performance. So, it's the great, it's the great irony. We need to be able to shut that down. We need to be able to get that out of the way. That's where the self-sabotaging patterns live, in that, you know, in that arena, so we need to be able to develop the skill, and this is a skill that anybody can learn, but just to quiet down the thinking part of the mind, so that what arises allows an athlete to perform from a place of freedom, from a place of not worrying about what's going to happen, not caring about the outcome, not playing with fear. Those, I think, are some of the biggest roadblocks right now. There's a lot of fear, there's a lot of attachment to outcome, and just playing for fun is, is almost extinct. It's, you know, we've almost chased that out of youth sports now.

 

Todd Arkell  29:48

It feels that way, doesn't it? Right? Like, I mean, I think if you talk to a lot of parents whose kids might be playing a high level of something, they might say, oh. Know, it doesn't, you know, doesn't really matter, and you know this is fun, and whatever, but you know there, there are these unspoken pressures I think that parents put on their kids, coaches put on the kids, right, that create an environment that makes it difficult, you know, like, you know, even just like a communication thing, you know, you might get a coach, sit a player on the bench, and it might be one of your better players, and they don't tell them why. Coach hates me, coach hates me. Yeah, but, but it's all, yeah, it's like, well, you're sitting there as a, as a kid, going, well, what did you do to, what did I do to piss him off? Did I piss him off? Did I do something wrong? Was it my play? Was it, you know, and without, you know, I'm just going to speak to coaches who might be listening, you know, like communication is a big part of this, like if you know, if you're not playing a kid, maybe you say, hey, in this particular environment, I don't, you know, I think somebody else is the right person to play, and you're not, and you know we can talk about it later. You know, maybe it's in the heat of the game, right? Just to say, hey, just be ready, right? Like, be ready right now. This is where I'm going, and I'll talk to you. You know, I'll tell you later what's going on. And it's sometimes it's a feel from a coach that says I'm not going to play that person, I mean, I've coached hockey, I've coached soccer, I've coached baseball, you know, and I've had kids, you know, like, you know, you got a power play and somebody's like, "Oh, what, why am I not on the ice? And I'm like, "Hey, I got to make a decision on who I think the right personnel are, we'll talk about it afterwards. That's a game, hockey's a sport, that's baseball, you can, you got time to sit there and chit chat, and whatever, hockey is a sport, you don't have time to really give you a 10 minute diatribe, why? Hey, by the way, you threw three pizzas up the middle, I can't have you out there right now, whatever that is, and but you can explain that later, but you don't need to also destroy them in the moment, right? It's just like we're good. This, I got to make this decision, right? So, I mean, but just some sort of communication, I think, will help you know. Even so, with parents, you know, I remember an athlete that talking to, and I was like, "Oh, I met your mom, she's lovely. He goes, "Don't let her, don't let her fill you, she once made me walk home after a game where I played bad, I was like, oh my god, right. So I think you know the message to parents and coaches, I think is a little less pressure that you can put on and recognize that and be part of that, so it definitely makes a difference,

 

Andrew Pardy  32:41

couple things there that jump to mind. Todd, my philosophy is, and I'm a coach, I coach a pretty high level of volleyball right now, and I prep my girls up front. You may be taken out of a game, and I'm not going to have time to explain it to you, but here's where it's coming from. Like, I love you, I love you all equally. I don't favor anybody. My job as a coach is this, this, and this, and that could mean you're taken out if you're not playing well. I just, just, just to prep them up front, and then explain that afterward, or leave the door open. Do you, you know, do you, do you want to know why, or you know, just want to make sure that you're understanding why nothing personal with you doesn't have anything to do with you as a person, but if you're not communicating with an athlete as your coach, that is massive anxiety for the athlete, and in hockey this just goes on all season, there's very little communication, so by the end of a season of a kid getting benched or short shifted or not playing special teams, or and there's no communication around it, that is a recipe for uncertainty and anxiety. You know, I think the other thing I'll say is one of the pillars that I work on, you know, when I'm working through a performance DNA blueprint, is I need an athlete to understand their own communication and learning style, and how they're oriented toward other people. They need to know that about themselves, because what I encourage everybody is, you got to get feedback. Feedback's fuel. If you're not getting feedback from your coach, then you're missing a fuel source for your development, and if you're, you know, if we see in your communication profile that you're non-confrontational, then you're highly unlikely, or you'll be very uncomfortable to go seek out that feedback, and you will be short-changing your development if you allow that self-sabotaging pattern to continue.

 

Todd Arkell  34:34

Yeah, I think that's true too. I mean, like, and it's, it's hard. I mean, I, I work with a company called Intangible, and they have a bunch of different testing that they do for kids, and it's like also for coaches, like, here's how this player likes to be coached, right? So that you can then go, okay, let's figure that out, but yeah, it's a recipe for disaster if you have a non-confrontation. A kid who doesn't love confrontation or thinks a conversation is confrontation. Let's frame that too, because confrontation might be yelling at each other, but just asking a question isn't necessarily confrontational, but they see it, they feel it that way, and if you have a coach who is sort of not communicative or not approachable, that just totally compounds it, as far as how do you deal with that, you know, and it's here's a real-life example, so you have a non-communication, you know, a kid who doesn't like confrontation, and you have a coach who isn't approachable, what would you suggest to the athlete?

 

Andrew Pardy  35:39

Yeah, where you're running the problems is, and this is, I'll make a generalization here. In general, coaches are confrontational, and in general, especially teenage athletes are non-confrontational. So they need the athlete needs feedback from their coach, but the athlete fears the coach or doesn't want to bother the coach, or what you know, whatever it might be, whatever story they make up in their mind. So, you've got a just a big development gap there, you've got a, you've got a missed opportunity. So, what I do is, I've got a, I encourage, I mean, short story here, this, this is, there's part of a curriculum here, but short story is, I really teach an athlete how to approach a coach, and not only a coach, but other people in their community, because what they really need to do is, they need to be gathering feedback from any source that they can get it from, because that is just, that's that's gas for development, so it really is a lot of times with a, you know, a teenager strategizing what would this conversation look like, and what would it sound like, what am I looking for, what am I afraid of, why am I not doing this, you know, what's the worst thing that could happen here, so it's just coaching, mentoring, communication skills, understanding your own kind of roadblocks in that regard. And are they real? Are they true? Do you need to fear this person? They're just confrontational. It doesn't mean they're a bad person, or they can't help you, or don't want to help you. Their hockey coach has got 25 players that need to, they need to work with, so it's bandwidth problem as well.

 

Todd Arkell  37:24

Yeah, and I think a lot of coaches are a one size fits all type thing, right? Like this is the way I coach, and you get on, get with the program. You framed sport as a metaphor for life, and you know, I'd say, you know, from what I've read, you tie your mission to long term well being. So, what do you want an athlete to carry into adulthood long after they stop completing competing?

 

Andrew Pardy  37:47

I think that the big prize of being an athlete, there's many, I mean, it's it's the perfect metaphor for life, it's the perfect development scenario for a younger mind, I think. Honestly, probably the biggest thing that you know the people who come from my program take away that serves them well in life is they establish a healthy relationship with the thoughts in their mind. They have the right relationship there, because if you don't, the average person thinks 100,000 thoughts a day, and 90% of it's negative, and as we progress through our life, that becomes a terrible burden to carry around that much negative thinking, and unfortunately, that's that's what we do, that's that's the corner we we end up in, unless we take a look inside and figure out what a different relationship might look like or feel like, and if you can do that, it makes everything a lot easier in life, and it really lights a fire under an athlete, because what it does is it clears the way the, you know, the conceptual analytical thought that is one of the bigger barriers to performance.

 

Todd Arkell  39:06

So, you've got three daughters. Has that having those daughters has that changed the way that you coach other people's kids, or has it changed also maybe formed how you parent as well?

 

Andrew Pardy  39:19

So, I have three daughters, I've coached them all. I'm coaching my youngest right now. It's kind of hard to separate dad and the coach. I guess I see you as a dad, I'm a coach, as a coach, I'm a coach, but my mentality is really, whether you're my daughter or not, it's, you know, I love you. I love having you on this team. I want the best for you. I got your back doesn't necessarily mean you're going to play all the time, or you're going to get my car all the time, or, or you know, you don't have to do well in school, or whatnot, but I really just want to, I'd say, Todd, push my. My daughter's out of their comfort zone, and then support them there, so it's growth once they're out of that comfort zone, but push them out of the comfort zone, support, push them out of the comfort zone, support, and you know, I think what I see out there right now, coaches are good at pushing out of the comfort zone, but there's no support, and anxiety fills that fills that gap, and there's an epidemic of anxiety amongst teenage athletes right now, and I think that nobody talks about that. I don't know if anybody knows about that, but you know it's hard to see, but I think everybody needs to be aware there's there is an epidemic of anxiety amongst teenage athletes. Teenage athletes experience more anxiety now than the average mental health patient in the 1950s

 

Todd Arkell  40:47

My next question was going to be, if you could change one thing about youth sports culture that treats the mental side of the game, what would it be? I'm guessing reduce anxiety.

 

Andrew Pardy  40:58

It's got to be fun, all right. You gotta, why do we play sports? It's fun. It's a ball, just getting in an optimal state of performance, and, and just having a, having a ball playing, that's that's what it's about. And we take that away too early. We shouldn't be taking that away from 12, 1314, 1516, It's got to be fun, because if it's not fun, it's anxiety, and if it's anxiety, a lot of athletes quit. Like, there's a lot of athletes who could be college athletes or pro athletes who quit when they're young, because it's not worth it. It's too much anxiety. It doesn't feel good. I think that's that's the shame in North America. That's the, that's the shame of it. If you look at Scandinavian model, if you look at what's going on in Norway, it's fun, and they prioritize that, and they punch above their weight in the Olympics because they got way more teenagers competing at older ages because they're doing it for fun.

 

Todd Arkell  42:07

Yeah, it's true. I mean, you'll hear kids say, "Oh, I'm going to quit, whatever, quit whatever the sport is, I got to focus on school, and it's like, "Okay, but I often wonder if that's just an excuse, you know, thing, you know, like for them to be able to have a good reason to point to it, right? And with the not really saying what the real reason is, and I do agree, I think we gotta, even if you're even if you're trying to get a college scholarship, if you don't love the sport you're playing, it gets even harder at the next level, because the workload from an academics and an expectation of athletics is is way higher than it might have been in high school, right?

 

Andrew Pardy  42:53

Yeah, I mean, I'm a university athlete, and you got to love to play, you got to be the type of player they got to, they got to kick you out of the gym, they got to kick you off the ice. You got to have a passion for it, and you've got to love the art of getting an inch better every day, because that's, that's really your job, to get a little bit better every day, and to be able to fail and pick yourself up, and fail and pick yourself up, and fail and pick yourself, it's constant failure, and that's not for everybody. You got to love what you're doing enough to be willing to fail at it every day until you're good enough to get where you, where you want to go.

 

Todd Arkell  43:40

So, where can people, what type of programs do you have, and where can people go to learn more about working with you, if the, if your message resonated with them?

 

Andrew Pardy  43:51

Yeah, so I've got a program that I offer, it's called Mental Game Academy. Really, I mean, you can go to my website. I think you're going to link it in the show notes below, but

 

Todd Arkell  44:06

everything's in the notes. If the notes are below me, I don't, yeah, they're usually below me.

 

Andrew Pardy  44:12

Yeah, so that's a good place to start. You can just go there. There's some lot of good information on there, if what you see in that website or what you're seeing here resonates, you can book a free 30 minute strategy session with me, and we can just talk it through. We can talk about your athlete, where are they at, what are you seeing, what are the problems, what have you done in the past, where are you trying to get, you know, I get, I get a lot of phone calls for me, it's about fit. If I've got the right fit, like I said, I've never.. I've never had a complaint, and I guess part of the reason I've never had a complaint is because I don't.. I don't work with people who aren't, aren't the right fit, and by fit I mean you can't want this for your, your teenager. They've, they've got to kind of have it. And then they've got to want to, they've got to want to understand what is they need to do to be the best they can be.

 

Todd Arkell  45:08

Another guest, a recent episode we had, you know, our guest said, you know, you got to understand at 16 you're turning to the keys to the car, turning over the keys to the car, and their self motivation is what's going to take over, because now they're driving themselves here, they're driving themselves, they've got to be able to kind of be in control. It was a good analogy, it really is that, that you know, at some point you know you can help support them and everything else, but you can't want it more than want it, want it more than your kid.

 

Andrew Pardy  45:37

You can't make them want it. Now there is a caveat to that, though there are situations where there's just anxiety that's preventing the desire from surfacing, the desires there, but there's a fear of failure, there's a fear of success there, there's a roadblock there that when you clear that roadblock, the passion can kind of surface, so we, that discovery call, or that strategy session call, is really meant to, for me to get a handle on, can I help, is really what I'm, is really what I'm trying to, anybody I can help, I love to help, but you know, there are, I can't help everybody, I guess is the simple way to put it.

 

Todd Arkell  46:17

Andrew, thank you so much for the time, it's been enlightening, I love the discussion. We'll look forward to hearing more from you.

 

Andrew Pardy  46:25

Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

 

Matt Cundill  46:26

Thanks for listening. For more including resources and more about the show, go to The Mental approach.com

 

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  46:34

a production of The Sound Off Media Company.