Hello there, this is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday morning.

I'll be guest hosting Radio Headspace this week and I'm so happy to be here. If you

don't know, I'm an author, journalist and podcast host. And over the years, I've written

a lot about how to become great at the things you love. So this week, we're going to talk

about performance. I'll be sharing some personal experiences that led me to where I am and

the lessons I learned along the way about how to reach your goals.

But first, we're going to start off today's episode by taking a look at the late Bud Winter,

one of the people featured in my new podcast, Legacy of Speed. I show about the athletes

of the Speed City Track and Field program and their legacy of sports activism. Winter

was one of the greatest track and field coaches of all time. He broke the mold of traditional

training techniques for sprinters by introducing revolutionary relaxation techniques. Today,

I'll dive into some of those techniques and show you how they can help improve your

fitness routine, work performance and stress levels.

I think if you made a list of the greatest coaches of the 20th century, Bud Winter would

be in the top five. He was a coach at San Jose State who spent the war years working on

a project to try and improve fighter pilot performance. What he learned was that an enormous

number of fighter pilots in the Second World War were kind of crashing and burning, were

having breakdowns because they couldn't handle the stress of flying. And he was part of

a group that said that peak performance comes through relaxation, not through obvious

effort. Reading ourself and gritting our teeth and tensing our muscles and all those things

that we do naturally faced with a big challenge actually undermines our ability to meet that

challenge. The people who were assembled by the Air Force during the Second World War

...