Good morning. Welcome to the Increasing Impact Podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode

1,777. Having the opportunity to watch very closely how elite athletes

perform under pressure has been a laboratory of learning for myself to learn

from and to witness and to ask how they do it. There was one athlete I'll never

forget who was in a very stressful situation. There's a lot of noise,

thousands of people screaming at him, high leverage or high pressure situation

every moment counted. And I watched him do something I'd never seen him do

before. I saw him stare down, he took a long deep breath, he got up on the

mound and he ended up performing incredibly well. I asked him after the game,

what did you do? It looked like you slowed the game down. And he taught

himself to do something. He said, when I start to feel my body and my mind get

stressed, I quiet my eyes. And I said, what do you mean you quiet your eyes? He says,

I pick something very small and I stare at it. And I make this situation small.

And in this case, he stared at a pebble, a tiny little pebble on the

pitcher's mound. He stared deeply at it while he was staring at it, he took a

long slow deep breath. And I said, well, why do you do that? He goes in order to

quiet my mind, I need to quiet my eyes and I need to quiet my breath. And they

helped me center myself, be where my feet are and to focus on the next pitch.

And he was very successful. And so whether you're a pitcher or a soccer player

or a student or corporate professional or a mom or a dad or whatever, if you

find yourself feeling stressed, you can try this technique out, quiet your eyes and

quiet your breath. If you feel the stress mounting, the aggravation mounting,

...