If you can get through the first three minutes and feel like you're doing a good job and get some of that feedback from the audience that feels like you're doing a good job, the whole atmosphere changes.

Welcome to the Art of Chon. I'm Jordan Harvenger and I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo.

On this episode we're talking with Daniel McGinn. He is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review and the author of Siked Up, a book that is well titled because it's about getting Siked Up.

How the science of mental preparation can help you succeed. On this episode of AOC we'll discuss how high performing professionals and elite athletes deploy techniques to boost their confidence, reduce their anxiety and optimize their energy.

This is true whether you're pitching a VC, arguing to a jury, making a sales call, going on a job interview or even going on a first date. We'll also learn why superstition and rituals can actually improve your performance and how we can develop our own pre-performance rituals that work for us and we'll uncover how to combat pre-performance nerves thanks to some very practical research that comes from the world of music of all places and how we can learn to reframe and channel the jitters into the juice that makes us move forward.

Now let's get Siked Up with Daniel McGinn.

Daniel, thanks for being with us today. Much appreciated.

Thank you.

Siked up the science of mental preparation. On its face, how can this be scientific? Sure, I jump up and down. I slot myself in the face a couple times. I get stoked.

Or if I'm a surgeon, there's this sort of image of surgeons that came out of, I don't know, some 90s movies where you're listening to death metal in the surgery room at full volume with your hands up in the air so you don't touch anything getting ready to do open heart surgery. There's obviously more to it. You spent time researching this. How do people harness this power or is this just something we've seen in movies?

So you've definitely seen it in sports movies in particular and I got interested in this one. I was in high school. I was not a very good athlete, but I played in the basketball and the football team.

And we would do all this stuff in the locker room. We had certain songs we would listen to. There were pep talks. There were rituals. It never seemed very scientific to me back then. It seemed like the coaches were just sort of making it up and using amateur psychology.

And it was only a few years ago when I started working at Harvard Business Review every so often I would see an academic study come across my desk that touched on some of these things that touched on rituals or touched on how people could get in the right mindset by priming themselves before they performed.

So once you take a deep dive into this, it turns out there is actually a fair bit of science, even if most of the practitioners don't really know about it.

I'm just thinking, all right, so I get up. I don't feel like working out. I put on I have the tiger. I feel like working out. I go workout the end, right? But there's a lot more to it. There's a lot of mental prep that we can do. There's superstition and ritual, which we've seen. If you're looking at baseball games, you've ever seen those. There's a ton of that stuff.

Pep talks trash talk. There's all kinds of things you hear about athletes like Michael Jordan walking into the opposing teams locker room and saying hello to some of the players just to sort of get in their head and also to be in their space. So he feels like he's able to dominate during the game and on the court when they get out there.

There's all kinds of little bits like this and it seems like these psyched up rituals are these psyched up practices or the practices of getting in the zone or getting stoked for a performance really are as unique to the individual as anything else.

Yeah, no question. There's lots of techniques here. Some of them will work for one person and not for the other. So you really have to sort of customize it. But the main message I wanted to give in writing the book was that we expect Michael Jordan or Tom Brady or Michael Phelps to have a good time.

Michael Phelps to have a routine that they do before they perform well, you know, you and I are not pro athletes, but we have really important days at work. We have to go pitch somebody. We have to go sell something. We have to negotiate. We have to interview somebody.

We should have a routine that puts us in the right mindset to you know, there's no reason even if you're not a professional athlete that you shouldn't spend a couple of minutes trying to sum it up your A game and getting yourself ready to perform before something important.

It's something I've learned to do in my job and especially if you're in sales or if you're an entrepreneur, I think it's really critical.

It seems that this is something most of us think this is just something athletes do right. Okay, I'm getting ready to for a basketball game getting ready for a boxing match for Rocky purposes here with the eye of the Tiger. That's kind of the everyone's intro to getting psyched up is probably that montage. I would imagine.

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