LinkedIn Presents.

I'm Maura Aaron Smiley, and this is The Anxious Achiever, the show that looks at the intersection of mental health and work and how we can all do both better.

You know, you can't really move around the work world without feeling a connection to sports.

The metaphors in the meeting, the mention of teams and winning, going for the goal, leaving it all in the field.

And we know there's a lot of lessons, positive and negative, that we can take from the field,

the court, the pool, and put them into our work. We've also seen a lot of high-profile athletes in recent years opening up about their mental health struggles, from Simone Biles to Michael

Phelps to Kevin Love,

who I spoke with in 2020. Today, we wanted to return to the idea of sports, mental health,

and performance, and what we can all learn, even if we're not athletes. Later in the show,

I'm joined by former NFL star Ryan Mundy, who is now running the mental health startup,

Alchemy Health.

But first, whether you're driven in your career or you're an elite athlete, it's all about

performance or our fear of not performing. And so we figured who better to speak with than a

performance psychologist. Here's Alex Auerbach, who has worked with the

NBA's Toronto Raptors and the elite college athletes at the University of Arizona.

I just have to ask at the outset, you know, I feel like there's a stereotype that athletes might not be as in touch with their feelings as people in other professions.

But I intuitively feel like that's not true. What do you say about that?

It's a really interesting hypothesis and maybe generalization we've made about

athletes, I think in part because we see them do some really demanding physical things in many

situations. They're sort of juggling pressure and these other circumstances that might feel

overwhelming to people. But I actually think sport itself and playing the game is like one of the purest

expressions of emotion that we can see.

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