How Elite Performers Build Toughness - Steve Magness

We often think confidence and we think certainty. It's not certainty, it's confidence in knowing what the task is, what the demands are, and then what are your capabilities? The capability to know that win, lose, or draw, I can navigate through this thing.

Talk to me about your background for people that aren't familiar with your work and what you've done in the past. Wh- what is your career up to this point?

Yeah. Absolutely. So, um, I was a high level runner, so I was a four-minute-and-one-second miler, just missed that four-minute barrier growing up. So, that was kind of my background. Went to university and college, expecting to go entirely the sports route and be a professional athlete, and I completely bombed. I never improved on my kind of junior best, so I quickly realized, oh, I have to pay attention to academics and figure out what in the world it is I want to do. So I did the logical thing, which was I'm gonna get into coaching. So after university, I got into athletic coaching in track and field and did that for a very long time, um, well, for over a decade. Early on in that, I actually worked for, for Nike for a couple years (laughs) and went through a big, uh, whistleblowing experience and had to leave that, and then went into, uh, collegiate coaching here in the US. And then from there I've kind of expanded out into, okay, performance is performance. Yes, I wanna help people run faster on the track or per- perform better in sport, but you know, the same skills that athletes are utilizing, so are executives, so are entrepreneurs, so are physicians, and really, you know, exploring that more holistically. So in the last, gosh, three, four years, I've kind of expanded out to, uh, you know, just try to help people perform better.

How much can you talk about the Nike whistleblower situation?

Yeah, we can go down however far you want.

I, t- tell me the story. I didn't know about this.

(laughs) Yeah, so it actually, it actually is funny because it, it started or it exploded in the UK first actually, uh, because there was a, a BBC program that kind of broke the story. But essentially what happened was I was working with a group of professional athletes. I was assistant coach, um, for the Nike Oregon Project, and I witnessed in the year and a half I was there some things that, you know, kind of rang alarm bells. So after I was there, I, or after I, I was done, I went and called US Anti-Doping up and said, "Hey, here's what I've witnessed. Here was my experience. I have no idea on if this breaks the rules or not, but it seemed kind of sketchy to me." And there was a lot of things like, uh, you know, i- injections of various supplements and, like, all, all sorts of crazy stuff. There was, like, not blatant, like, "Hey, here's some steroids, use it." But it was, uh, it was shadier enough where there were questions around it. And then USI Anti-Doping spent, gosh, almost nine years investigating it and then ultimately found that the, the head coach and the doctor there had, uh, violated anti-doping rules and they were, they were banned. So I spent a- again, nine years of my life while I continued working and coaching and, like, writing and all that stuff, but for nine years I was, you know, at the beck and call of, uh, going in to testify and, like, do all sorts of, you know, talk to (laughs) law enforcement and all sorts of crazy things, um, as part of that.