80% Mental with Dr. Len Zaichkowsky and Dan Peterson, Authors of The Playmaker’s Advantage and The Playmaker’s Decisions
We have renowned sports psychologist Len Zaichkowsky and mental performance consultant Dan Peterson on to provide a deep dive on the cognitive demands of the sport and performance. Len and Dan recently released their new book, The Playmaker’s Decisions.
As a professor, researcher and consultant for almost four decades at Boston University, Len pioneered sport psychology by bringing cognitive neuroscience and sport performance together as an interdisciplinary science. He has consulted with teams in the NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB, Australian Rules Football, the Spanish men’s national soccer team, and Olympic sport organizations around the world. Len is a former president and a fellow of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology.
Dan is an Author, Speaker and Consultant. Specializing at the intersection of neuroscience and sports performance, Dan combined twenty-five years of technology management experience with his second life as a sports dad and coach to explore how athletes make decisions.
In this episode, Len, Dan and Cindra discuss:
- What are the attributes of a playmaker
- The best way to move forward after a mental mistake
- How to make a clutch play when you want to
- The Athlete Decision Model and how we can use this concept to improve our performance
- How we can improve our decision making skills in moments of pressure
Dan: it’s going great Cindra thanks for inviting us.
Len: Yeah so looking forward to this and rather enjoyed listening to some of your podcasts and some of the work that you’ve done so quite familiar what you’re into, and I hope that Dan and I can contribute a little something different, and we’ll go.
Cindra Kamphoff: Okay excellent well I read your last book The playmakers decisions and then you have another book that came before that the playmakers advantage, so I thought we could start is let’s just really define what you think a playmaker is?
Dan: Sure I’ll go first and then can anyone can follow up so you’re right, I mean when we set out to write the first book back in first of all, I’m sports dad I’m not an academic I’m not a PhD. I work in the neuroscience world now and as a project manager, but nothing to do like you do Center like Len did for almost 40 years at Boston university and so, but I was a sports dad with three sons who and I loved coaching them up to a certain point till my expertise was gone and then just watching them and I was always amazed with what they did, but I always saw those one or two kids out in the field who just seem to have something extra they just their vision on the field, the passes that they saw that nobody else did the decisions they made very quickly and, of course, being a fan of all sports, you know you watch any fast moving team sport and there’s those same players out there that just rise above the rest and the common term across many different sports is playmaker you know they just make plays and so, when Lynn and I sat down to write this book, it was kind of like we wanted to connect with parents and coaches and as line will say he doesn’t want to write another textbook, and so we picked that term as a way to kind of talk about the brain and talk about an athlete’s brain and all the stuff that must be going on in an athlete’s brain when they’re out on the field, the islip court. And so we thought now playmaker seems like a good term, so I think we’ll go with that and I think it’s something that others can identify with.
Cindra Kamphoff: And I like playmaker because it makes me think of a person that can actually make the plays in clutch situations and today you know you might think of playmaker just in sports, but you can be a playmaker in life as well?
Len: Absolutely yeah we wrote about them, in fact, when I talked about Albert vendors great work at Stanford who I got to know quite well you know I call them the playmaker in the field of psychology wrote that first book,but if I could just expand upon what damage is saying syndrome is that kind of lead in my career at Bu in us and I was doing moving more into the into the elite pro sports world and bringing sport science in there, I realized that one thing that in our field of psychology we weren’t teaching a lot to our students is the whole area of decision making the kind of the whole idea of how athletes decide these playmakers what is it about them and I got into that pretty late and Dan was thinking along the same lines and that’s kind of why we partnered but you know, Dan also has this great story, we talked about it during Mike
Sullivan, the coach of he wasn’t quoting the Pittsburgh penguins then, but he was giving a seminar to a lot of aspiring hockey coaches and he was just talking about the brain and future coaches have to understand how the brain works and how people learn in order to be an effective coach and so it turns out that I have Mike as a student at Bu and he asked him what capacity, he could help with the book and of course we got him to write the foreword That was a great start, but he says, you know the best playmaker I know in the world of AKI today is called Sidney Crosby you’ve got to come to Pittsburgh and spend some time with him, so I did.
Cindra Kamphoff: Oh wow.
Len: You know what you know, so it was kind of a wonderful experience and have said talk to us about that how and he knew this was very important, and he had that skill set that he can see the ice better than most players and he can make quick and accurate decisions and.
Len: it’s why he is what he was or is, and so we then just kind of following other athletes and other sports and we basically getting very similar answers, you know that that yeah they recognize that they had that wonderful skill set and I felt that gosh we’ve got to promote that concept to teach other people in our field to get into better understanding the cognitive field.
Cindra Kamphoff: Yeah that’s wonderful well, and when I look at your book you defined you know playmaker is one that can take over the game with superior athlete cognition and I know, cognition is part of you know your decision making maybe let’s define what you mean by cognition and then we can dive into decision making?
Dan: yeah I think that’s you know, when we picked out the first book and what we wanted to talk about it was more just the broad landscape of everything out there that’s going on in the in the athletes brain and it’s really become as Lynn said more and more coaches are interested in learning about the brain players and athletes are learning about their brain us as adults in our work life we’re learning how to use our brain and make decisions and one of the things is just if you want, we wanted to make it more commonplace to talk about it, to give parents and coaches and athletes kind of this common vocabulary that they could talk about these things rather than buried into some neurons and synapses and stuff like that, so we you know there’s a lot of different models out there Lynn and I just thought about it for a while and said, you know this term athlete cognition that it sounds like something we could explain easily and people could grasp, so we broke that into basically three major functions as a player who’s out on the field goes through thousands of times a game, think about a soccer midfielder or a hockey Center and thousands of times a games, they have to go through this loop, and we call it the athlete cognition cycle and it’s basically search decide and execute it’s pretty simple to talk about, but when we divide that out that’s kind of how we divided out the first book is into those major sections search being obviously perception vision sensory input decide, obviously, just like it sounds that black box in the middle, where they’re actually going to make a decision of what they’re going to do next move past shoot do something and then execute obviously all the skill technical skill training that they need to carry off those and they all play on each other, you can’t make great decisions if you’re not perceiving all the opportunities you can’t know
execute the right thing, if you made a poor decision etc so it’s a circle that we kept coming around and around it again and we kind of form, the first book around that.
Len: Yeah and I think you said or that other people have kind of grabbed on to that too, and I know they’re applying it, we had at our biometrics conference last week, Adam even Hoffenheim in in Germany and talking about how they’re using technology to to to teach mostly soccer players but they’ve got hockey and basketball teach him to scan the search for cues on the surface, that they’re playing the game they’re playing and then and then making that decision and then executing it flawlessly and we also had Kevin progress can from it was an elite soccer coach from Scotland who talked about those same concepts but rather than using technology, how do we create practices on the on the on the pitch and tight areas, so we can teach them to to scan better and look for cues and then make quick decisions and then flawlessly executed don’t mess up and then holds true and any area that whether it’s a surgeon or a pilot or a police officer it’s the same stuff happens you’re searching for cues and then you decide, then you execute.
Dan: You know, going back to I was just going to say, going back to to Mike Sullivan, and one of the things that was so interesting is that a coach at his level to timestamp cup winner. Playing or coaching at the highest level played the game for years and years in the NHL and that’s one of the things that he brought out when he wrote the foreword for the first book and just a quick, short excerpt peer but he was saying, when I was playing in college in the late 80s at Boston university taking lens classes the new frontier was in physical fitness and training that’s when players started to get into the weight room work on strength and conditioning developed power and the neuro muscular system that was cutting edge back then, now we have pretty good understanding of how to train athletes physiologically the next frontier is how to get players to better understand anticipation skills recognition skills decision making, how to deal with the high stakes environments, how to handle pressure and he said in my generation there’s always been an assumption around the rinks that quote hockey sense is something that you’re born with you either have it, or you don’t and you can’t teach it, but the reality is that hockey sense or sports Center is not unlike learning how to skate or learning how to stick handle the new capability is what we call them that’s kind of where we came up with the playmakers advantage it’s something they have that hopefully others can understand and develop those certain those certain parts of their game.
Cindra Kamphoff: Excellent so you know when I think about search decide and execute and sometimes how quickly that we go through those three processes, what would you say to an executive to an athlete to a team, you know, anyone who wants to improve their decision- making skills?
Len: I think the most important thing to start with is that so often individuals haven’t really thought too much about this and it just heightened awareness about the, let’s think about how important decisions are in the work that you do and we heighten one’s awareness of how we look for the important cues to help us make the best possible decisions and then learn to make them quickly and accurately and then whatever you’re doing execute that flawlessly and that’s
thing that you have to you, deliberately practice as well, so yeah I think it’s heightening that awareness, initially, is the most important first step.
Cindra Kamphoff: Great. And do you have anything to add to that?
Dan: You know, I was just thinking about we had a conversation in the first book with Dr. Anders Ericsson from Florida state yeah unfortunately he passed away in the last year.
Dan: But you know his whole research for years and years was on deliberate practice, and that was the message, he tried to get across you know what grew out of that with Malcolm Gladwell book outliers is the 10,000 hours, etc, but when we talk to Dr Erickson for our first book, two years ago and he was always you know, saying that the message is about deliberate practice and whether that sports whether that’s music whether that’s business skills, whatever you want to talk about whatever you want to become an expert in. That you have to go through this process of deliberate practice, you have to work on the weaknesses and get better at them and so that I think that applies to all walks of life and it’s something that we spend some time on in the first book.
Cindra Kamphoff: So one of the things that I remember reading in your book was this idea of mental mistakes. You know and I’m thinking in spore it could be a penalty or false start, and I think even you said that the top four penalties were mental mistakes. So I think that’s what you reported so give us a sense of how or what gets in the way of decision making and how do these mental mistakes get in the way of decision making and just tell us a little bit about how that relates to what we’ve talked about so far?
Dan: Yeah well as we went into So the first book came as you said, came out in 2018 and a lot of great feedback from that and mostly from coaches and parents and they liked everything we had it there at a high level, but they all said, you know, the thing that if you wanted to solve anything for us as coaches or parents dive deep into that middle that decide box that black box of when they’re actually taking in the input and making decisions and because that’s a lot of the places where it goes wrong, you know and that’s what causes the mental mistakes. They know better than to jump off side they know better than to grab on to someone for holding but, yet they do it, and still so they could understand how they you know why they make those mistakes. One of the contacts Glenn had was down in Australia, of the Australian Football League john long Meyer who’s a well-respected head coach of the Sydney swans down there and we talked to him Atlanta talk to him and interviewed him for the first book and it was interesting he have a quote here from him, he said, you know athletes come to us having mastered most of the technical demands of the game, but without question, the biggest challenge our coaches face is teaching our players, how to make quick and accurate decisions on the field and so that’s where we spent a lot of the time, and this latest book is talking about the decisions in one of the areas that I’ll just jump into is just like we had the athlete cognition model at a high level search decide execute in the first book in this one, when we drill down to decision making. We developed something called the athlete decision model because those are the kind of questions we wanted to answer.Why do some players and that’s kind of the subtitle of our book some players make clutch plays some players that don’t mistakes what’s the
difference, why are they doing that, so we kind of broke that down into a new model we call the athlete decision model.
Cindra Kamphoff: Yeah and I remember, I think the five six components, maybe were time tactics rules attention, cognition emotions I got that right.
Dan: That’s very good.
Cindra Kamphoff: All right, all right, I did my homework. So, give us a sense of you know either Dan or Len the athlete decision making model, and you know how maybe we could use that to make better decisions?
Len: I love Dan take off take that on but there’s one other thing I want to mention before we leave that area, we were just talking about is sometimes overthinking is, is where the mistakes are made to and we talked a little in the first book to on choking behavior which I don’t like that term because it’s you know it’s failure to perform in the clubs, but sometimes it’s the if I’m thinking of baseball, for example, you know better strikes up and they say we talk, no, it was it was a perfect pitch was non editable pitch, and so we don’t talk too much about that so it’s just somebody just outperformed the other person, on the one on one situations so then i’ll let you talk about the model.
Dan: Thanks Len and the thing is, you know there’s a lot of and we’ll talk, I think a little bit about the decision making theory that’s out there, but one of the things we pulled from all of those is you know, obviously, making decisions in a time constrained environment and in a sports environment is a lot different than you know picking what car to buy or what job to take etc, where you have a lot of time to think about weigh the options. So, as you mentioned those six areas that we identified three of those are internal factors three of them are external factors, the internal factors we labeled traits or things that come naturally to an athlete and One of those is attention how well they pay can pay attention to the right cues out on the field out on the Court and that’s a lot of the perception research that’s out there and how they take in that sensory information, the cognition part is really a little bit of what you’re born with in terms of information processing speed and working memory there’s been quite a few studies that show that those two variables across athletes really determine a lot of you know, expert versus novices of how well they can process that that information and then of course emotion put a quote in there from Phil Knight founder of Nike saying sports is like rock and roll both are dominant cultural forces both speak and international language and both are all about emotions and whether you’ve played sports or you’ve watched sports it’s all about emotion, but emotion can get the best of someone and can cause some of those mental mistakes or it can cause someone to rise to the occasion and make a clutch play for the external factors, you know we really kind of thought about what really has an effect. That is maybe a little bit out of the players control the athletes control or heck can daily life out of our control, but one of the things, obviously in sport, like we talked about his time so whether that time on the clock 24 second clock whatever it is or time of your opponent coming at you, you have the ball, you have the Puck and a half a second, you have to decide what you’re going to do or you’re going to
you’re going to lose the ball the other one is rules of the game like we talked about jumping offsides holding etc. players young players at some point in their development, they learn the rules they’re taught the rules they get into organized sport and they have officials who will you know enforce the rules on them, but somehow in their decision making, they have to overlay subconsciously the rules, so they know this is what I can and can’t do sometimes they make conscious decisions to break the rules, sometimes they make emotional decisions to break the rules and sometimes they just jump off side and he just weren’t paying attention and then the last one is tactics so coaches spend all this time, showing game film drawing up strategies and tactics for the next opponent and they dump all of this on their athletes and they’re like here’s how we’re going to play the game against this opponent. And so again, especially for developing athletes, they have to take that out into the field in under the pressure of time and under the pressure of the rules and the emotion of the game and all of that they have to say, oh that’s right coach wanted me to do this, not that I can pass here, but not there, this is how we’re supposed to bring the ball up the field, etc. and so, those are the three things that kind of way down on the decision making of athletes and then based on their internal makeup of their traits you kind of all combined and how well they’ll do with the decision making.
Cindra Kamphoff: That’s really helpful so then traits include attention, cognition emotions and the constraints would be time tactics and rules yep yeah, let’s talk a little bit about emotions, because I find that really interesting and I’m sure I know that the people who are listening also will tell us a bit about what type of emotions you think help or enhance decision making?
Len: Well, should I just say that it’s the best book I’ve read on is quite recent a recent one by Dr Sara Evans from New Zealand who’s a psychiatrist he worked with the all blacks rugby team, and he wrote a book on this whole topic of finding balance and controlling your emotions that balance, you need between the sympathetic nervous system which energize you and parasympathetic that kind of slows you down. So it’s emotions, going to be very healthy in a lot of sports, but they get it if you get overly emotional it can hinder your performance and then there’s certain emotions like fear we just don’t want to have so it’s incumbent upon us to kind of help athletes and help coaches teach athletes to control those emotions, particularly the negative emotion, the positive ones yeah I think we have to encourage that.
Cindra Kamphoff: Yeah that’s really helpful yeah and I was just thinking about helping people find going to the ideal emotions that they want to feel to play well and I was curious how that makes you know impacts decision making, I think there was something about aggression in your book and what you know do either of you have any thoughts on that how that helps or hinders decision making?
Dan: yeah I was thinking about one of the theories that are out there, that that we were mentioning in that that chapter on emotions and it’s by Dr Michael eyes neck and Dr mark Wilson and it’s called the intentional control theory and by itself that’s its own theory, but then they took that and applied it to sports rather than just across a wide variety of domains and I’m looking here at one of the quotes from how they describe how they approach to sports and they said quote sports provides almost a perfect environment for examining performance
under pressure skills that have been honed and perfected during practice can break down, just when the need to execute them as greatest and then in studying that they found that you know any factor combination of factors that increase the importance of performing well can cause problems with decision making the proposed mechanism by which pressure exerted to effect unskilled performance is via increased anxiety and emotional response to thread comprising cognitive worry and physical physiological arousal and I was like yeah, cognitive worry and physiological arousal you think about young athletes out there and their desire to please their teammates to please their coach to please their parents who are on the sidelines if it’s a high school game to look good in front of their friends and obviously the physiological arousal you know the emotions of the game of there’s been studies of you know if your basketball player misses three shots you know what typically do they do next, if a one team commits X number of penalties are they likely to come back from that or not and so there’s been a lot more attention spent to understanding what happens if something goes wrong our proposal is to the playmaker can come back from that a lot better and can control those emotions and make them best next decision versus someone who’s not as experienced will be a lot more affected by those emotions.
Len: The center what I liked about Evans book is that he really simplified it for players and coaches and called it, the Red state blue state and the common language you know you’re in the red, you know, which means that’s not good get into the blue state, you know, and hopefully they’ve learned how to move from the Red state into the blue state so it’s a very simple concept but rather powerful and I really liked it and because of emotions for sure, have an impact on high pressure performance.
Cindra Kamphoff: That’s great Led, what was the name of the book, performing under pressure, I think, last year, then dropped and so your listeners may want to look for it on Amazon performing under pressure.
Len: You know he’s not the best writer in the world, but I, like the way he conceptualized it kept it as simple as possible.
Cindra Kamphoff: Right, and I think we need simple things to be able to actually implement it and if it’s like you know, and if we can say that, on the field around the Court, you know hey get to your blue state or red state that I when I connect back to emotions I think of red is like anger and frustration, you know, whereas blues like calm and confidence?
Len: That’s right that’s exactly yeah the other thing I want to mention, so you don’t forget about it, is it one of my colleagues in Australia, Dr Eugene Adrian has put together a kind of an international task force to study this cognitive fitness so for your audience with real interest in this rather new area cognition and performances just kind of follow that literature, because it’s going to explode in the next couple of years where Dr Ayman really wants to kind of have a common language about what are the factors that make up cognitive fitness, how do we measure it and then, how do we train it and I think that’s going to have a huge impact, not only
in sport, but it’s across disciplines into the military and tactical decision making special forces and police policing and certainly with surgeons and other hyper pilots other high performers.
Cindra Kamphoff: Well, thanks for the heads up on that, and that was kind of connecting to my next question we’ve talked to you know about emotion and some about cognition is there anything within the trade part you know you said attention, cognition and emotion Dan is there anything that we haven’t talked about related to decision making that you’ve you think would be important for the listeners to better understand?
Dan: I think there’s one of the distinctions we drew in in both books but more in the second book is you know there’s a lot of, as you know, Center there’s a lot of decision theory out there, developed by folks like land Dr Daniel Kahneman Dr. Gary Klein, and we really kind of we tried to draw from those examples out there to say how does this apply to sports and we were lucky enough to talk to Dr Klein for our second book and the difference there is, you know a lot of people know Dr economy and his research partner Amos diversity from thinking fast and slow the very popular book from several years ago where they introduced you know the system one and system two thinking system, one is you know do things automatically you know if you’re an experienced basketball player you don’t think about dribbling the ball you just do it versus system to where you’re actually having to compute and figure out some things and that’s where more of the decision making comes in, but the goal is to have all this tacit knowledge built up to see so many patterns over years of playing games you’re going to see thousands and thousands of game scenarios and patterns and those start to add up and build a tacit knowledge database in your brain that you subconsciously draw from when you’re presented with a new situation, and so, Dr economy and Dr diversity focused more on kind of what goes wrong with decision making heuristics biases how we’re influenced by these things when we’re trying to make the right decision Dr Klein, on the other hand, he spent his whole career outside of universities and studying decision makers in the wild, if you will, so he’s just, he’s studied firefighters medical personnel first responders military and really looking at instead of trying to bottom Eric come from a top down theory of decision making let’s watch these decision makers making decisions under pressure, under time under stress under emotions and then interview them and ask them how they do it, and what he found is no, they don’t go through a laundry list of the best options, you know Tom Brady when he drops back he doesn’t.
Dan: yeah he goes through his reads, but he doesn’t spend a lot of time creating new options, etc, he finds the option that’s going to work, the best. He does a little mini simulation in his brain that takes to half a second and then he makes a decision and go with it and it’s kind of a take the first theory that’s out there, and so what Dr Klein said is it’s unfortunate that we don’t teach a lot of that when kids are young, especially in sports. I have a quote here from him that we included in the book, this is Dr Klein, I think it’s too bad when the training and youth sports is about not making mistakes. It is very procedural it’s getting these drills down part of the assumption is once you get all the basics down at some point later in your career, you can learn about the decision making part, but now you have all kinds of negative transfer to overcome that you have to overcome the way you’ve been taught to do it, the decision making, should be there from the very start that’s the way of building adaptive models, rather than trying to graft it on later and you know he talks about kids become paralyzed because they’re afraid of making
mistakes and you can see the tension. So I think that’s one of the biggest things for parents and coaches to understand and that’s why you know we talked about in the book about as much as you want to, and I was one of those parents don’t coach your kids from the sidelines during a game don’t even if you have all the best intentions don’t you know remote control them and tell them where to pass it and what to do, and all of that, because they’re so busy trying to make the right decision out there that you’re just destroying the any automatic city, they have out there.
Cindra Kamphoff: Yeah I think that’s powerful a Dan, especially the quote by Gary Klein, and I see it, you know, I have two boys they’re 11 and 13 right now and we talk about mistakes in our home right and that mistakes are okay, but there’s just all these messages that they shouldn’t make mistakes, you know how are you going to learn, without making the mistakes, and you know they don’t want to make a mistake, either you know, when I think about just your how many different types of populations you’ve worked with and the incredible work that you’ve done within this field. Give us a sense of you know you could choose sport, or you could choose a different population that you’ve worked with you know, give us a sense of how what we’ve talked about today applies and applies to the real world how have you use what we’ve talked about in?
Len: You know, different populations well my passion was always around sport, but I knew it was quite generalizable these concepts and again was late in my career, where I finally got smart and figured out that really missing out on this important dimension of thinking and making good decisions and we just don’t teach that and we don’t understand it all that well, but I think you know people like you, with your communication systems are going to hopefully have an impact, but I bought similar things and teaching self-regulation skills to resurgence when we ran several projects with surgeons of major universities just helping them understand how to control what we talked about earlier their emotions, because you know it’s not winning and losing a game, you know it’s winning it’s perhaps losing a patient on surgery that if you just can’t afford to make a mistake, but so it’s learning how to control your emotions and those high pressure situations, so I really enjoyed working with that population people in medicine and. Len: And I just want to emphasize the concepts are the same it’s just a different environment they’re working.
Cindra Kamphoff: Yeah that’s exactly what I was thinking about I think I read something about how you’re working with surgeons so give us a sense of just how you might you know, briefly, I know you can’t go into detail but, help a surgeon control their emotions, because I think gosh if it, you know we can all relate to that maybe we’re not doing surgery, but there are definitely times, where we’re all in pressure situations and being able to control our emotions is equally important, at least to us in that moment?
Len: All the way I tried to get that message across, was to monitor their physiology or cycle physiology when they were in in the operating room get baseline measures of them prior to going in looking at their heart rate heart rate variability EG signals of gsr electrical thermal responses things that are really activated by their emotions and if you can, if they can look at
their baseline measures and then watch themselves. Well they’re performing and then feed it back to them and say ah now with this kind of information, I know this is important, and this is this is how we self-regulate those emotions, so that I am you know performing in my optimal ability in surgery so and I’ve done that a lot with athletes to and, of course, the world is getting a lot better where were you able to have wearables which not that many years ago they didn’t exist, but now these wearables provide can provide athletes with incredible feedback about their physiology and which are, by and large, related to their thinking and their emotions and they can better self-regulate those dimensions.
Cindra Kamphoff: Great, thank you for sharing that Len Dan and Len is, as we wrap up is there anything like I know we could talk for hours about your books but is there anything for sure that you wanted to make sure to cover that we haven’t yet?
Len: What do you think? You’re very, very thorough and asking important questions, and the only thing i’d like to leave you with is just that I’m thankful that you’re sharing this with your extensive audience and hopefully dad and I have been writing about and speaking about is will get more and more traction in the Community, this notion of cognition and how to be better at what we do by thinking about thinking.
Cindra Kamphoff: love it. Dan do you have any final advice or comments for our listeners know?
Dan: I just had one quote that I’ve always loved the first book. One of the gentlemen, in our first book Dr. Finn Bali he’s a well-respected developed a lot of country long term player development plans for Canada and other countries when they look at their Olympic sports, etc. and he always had this quote, that I loved, and I think it wraps up a lot of what we’ve talked about. This is Dr Bali says, I learned this from Jesuit priests in Ireland, if you want to teach Latin to Johnny you have to know Latin and, obviously, you have to know Johnny. So instead of Latin, if you want to teach any sport to Johnny you have to know that sport and you have to know Johnny. We know the sport very well, but we do not know Johnny or Jane from age six to 16 super imposing adult programs on young developing athletes doesn’t work and so I think that’s for parents sports parents and for coaches of developing athletes that’s one thing to keep in mind is they’re not adults, they’re not many adults, either, and so you know you have to think about as Mike Sullivan told us, you have to think about how their brain is processing this information you’re giving them.
Cindra Kamphoff: Yeah powerful Thank you Dan so Dan and lens books are called the playmakers advantage, how to raise your mental game to the next level and then they’re more recent. The playmakers decisions, the science of clutch plays mental mistakes and athlete cognition so Dan or Lynn, can you tell us where we might get the books and where we can follow, along with your work?
Len: Dan give you input on that.
Dan: As they say they’re everywhere that you buy books so yeah they’re on Amazon apple books Google play Barnes and noble you can, or if they’re not at your local bookstore you can ask them to order them so both of them are out there, wherever you choose and you know a lot of people buy him an Amazon but someone to buy them at their local bookstore, so there are other The first one is also both of them are in paperback and ebook format and the first one also has an audio version and a hardcover version.
Cindra Kamphoff: Excellent well, thank you both for joining us it was a pleasure to talk with you and to talk with you about your books and what you’ve been working so hard on the last several years.
Dan: Well, thank you, Cindra.
Len: Pleasure talking with you and feel free to share my contact information my email, particularly with the audience of should they want to reach out to me.
Cindra Kamphoff: Okay perfect do you want to give that to us know mine, just in case anybody wants to reach out.
Len: yeah it’s a simple one. Sport, like Boston university.edu.
Cindra Kamphoff: Perfect that’s an easy email.
Dan: it’s easier than spelling’s ICOski.
Cindra Kamphoff: Exactly well, thank you, Dan and Len, what a pleasure. Len: Pleasure Cindra.