Good morning. Welcome to the Increasing Re Impact Podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 1,77. 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 was 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 that 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. 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 the 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 to

help 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 the pain mounting and you start to struggle, remember this elite athlete,

quiet your mind by centering your eyes on a focal point and take one deep breath.

See what it's like. Try it out. Let me know how it goes and we'll do it again tomorrow.