Nov 12, 2021
Today’s guest is Judd Hoekstra. 
Judd is a leadership and human performance expert, bestselling author, and speaker.
'Crunch Time', Judd's most recent book co-authored with professional baseball pitching coach Rick Peterson, reveals the secrets of how to be your best under pressure. This book has been life-changing in my mindset, changing my mind in what is possible and how we can actually start to achieve our dreams and not just wish for them by becoming out best when it matters most.
In this interview, we discuss:
- How to deal with pressure situations.
- Seeing the opportunities rather than the threats of a situation.
- His amazing book 'Crunch Time'
- Why reframing can be a life-changing skill for you
- Why you need to train easy to go hard
- How you can learn to embrace the chaos
- The need for deliberate practice
- And so much more.
Here are some key points that I would advise you to concentrate on
- Mental strength and performance is not something that is regularly trained but can be the thing that changes you from good to great.
- We all face high-pressure situations in our lives, at all ages, and those who learn to perform well in high-pressure situations tend to perform better overall.
- The book can be used to help with mentality issues such as PTSD and OCD etc - it provides key techniques to change.
- Is dealing with pressure a skill that we can learn?
- A key concept is 'Is this the way I want to be or act'? This mantra was great for me to change my 'own worst enemy' style of self-talk and start to change the behaviors that were holding me back.
- We all struggle without worries, focus, demons etc, learning to deal with them is something that can be learned and your ability to cope with them to be better.
- Story-telling is a fantastic tool to teach, motivate and help others understand methods for change for the better.
- You can see each chance to be a threat or an opportunity - you get to choose. See things arising as an opportunity rather than a bad thing or a threat and instead what you can learn or achieve from it.
- What is reframing and how can it change your life?
- Your thoughts are like a radio channel - you don't need to listen to them, you can change the channel and listen to more uplifting, positive and helpful thoughts instead.
- How looking at a person who inspires you in how they act, and trying to mirror their change of behavior can be so important.
- Judd provides some amazing examples of questions to ask yourself to deal with fear and how you think about the scary situation - what will your version of the questions be?
- Humor and laughing can change your brain chemistry and allow you to change your thinking and ability to deal with a situation.
- How technology can be used to store good experiences to use for future success.
- Why do you need to focus on deliberate practicing and real-time feedback from your training?
- Prepare hard, perform easy. Use your training to prepare for the crunch time and learn to embrace the chaos!
- Why you need to go easy to go hard and why trying harder can cause you to fail more.
- How our brain uses previous situations to pick an automatic set of feelings, behaviors etc from previous experiences and how by evaluating your actions on what you could do to be better, can change your behavior for better success the next time.
- What does he want you to take from this interview?