Good morning and welcome to the Increase and Reefact Podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 1220.

Oftentimes, I am helping coaches and athletes with decision making, how they're going to respond to the future,

whether it be preparing for games or preparing for a season, short-term stuff,

long-term stuff. And an exercise that we focus on, a principle we focus on, is focus on the ripple,

not the rock. Ripple, not the rock. What I mean by that is, when you throw a rock into a pond,

it will create a ripple effect. And that is exactly how our decisions are. When we make a decision,

a lot of times we think, okay, if I do this, then this is going to happen. And we only think about

the short-term things. But the exercise that I take athletes and coaches through is we talk about

the second and third order effects, or in other words, the ripple effect. So if you do

this, okay, this might happen, but as a result of that, what might happen after that? And then what

might happen after that? It's just a simple exercise to run through in order to consider the long-term

effects. Because what happens is sometimes we'll make a decision, we'll choose an action we're going

to take, and we're so short-sighted that we don't realize that our answer to the problem is actually

creating more problems. The solution that you're creating is actually creating a myriad of

other problems.

And so you want to consider the ripple and not just the rock.

If by asking yourself, if then statements.

And so if you are trying to make a decision, if you're going through something and you're

wondering, trying to craft the future, I would invite you to consider the ripple and not the rock.

Think as long term as you possibly can. Poke holes in your assumptions, poke holes in your

best case scenario, and then run a probability on it and be aware of the things that you don't

know might happen and identify what looks like best case scenario and what looks like worst case scenario

...