You made it. You made it to Wednesday. And not just any Wednesday. You made it to Win It All Wednesday. We call it Win It All Wednesday here on the Sweet Spot because we believe the minute you wake up, the minute you open your eyes, the minute you take a deep breath in, and you say hello world, you're ready. You're already a winner. You woke up a winner this morning. And you know what I have to say to you? Congratulations. Congratulations. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm a board-certified psychiatrist. I work in high performance. I work with elite athletes. I work with elite businessmen. But you know what I like most? Working with elite individuals like yourself in the game of life as we try to make sense of this mystery that we call life. So, sweet spotters, we have been in a wonderful series here called Break the Barrier. We find ourselves in the third of seven episodes we're doing this week on the idea that we're going to break through barriers. Yes, indeed, walking through resistance, having courage under fire. This is Wood It All Wednesday, and you're listening to the sweet spot. So, when we began this week, we talked about turbulence. Remember that on Making Moves Monday? We said don't confuse turbulence with anything other than the fact that you're gonna get through it. It's just some shaking that you're gonna go through right here, right now, and it's gonna be alright. You know, that turbulence is the way your body activates when you approach something meaningful. When you're dealing with stress, you're dealing with something super meaningful, you often hit up turbulence. Yesterday in Take Action Tuesday, we moved inward. Yeah. And examine the internal narrator, the psychological code that's quietly shaping your identity and building invisible walls without you noticing that Darnold DMN. Remember the default mode network? We had fun with the DMN yesterday. If you didn't hear Take Action Tuesday and our talk on the DMN in the brain, check it out. Today, when it all Wednesday, the barrier is not internal. No, it's subtle, it's not imagined. Today the barrier is pushing back. You saw the Empire strike back. Those of you who are old enough, the Empire Strikes Back. This is the barrier strikes back. Okay, we're in a series here called Breaking the Barrier. Don't you think for a minute the barrier won't strike you back? Just because you have this wonderful title, Dr. Sweet, Break the Barrier, doesn't mean that the barrier isn't gonna smack you around if it can. Yes, the barrier can push back. And I want to slow this down because too often we romanticize resistance. We tell stories about courage as if it's cinematic and triumphant in the moment. And that's possible, but most real breakthroughs begin in discomfort. Most real breakthroughs be there we go. Most real breakthroughs begin in discomfort that feels almost unbearable. Yeah. That's the reality. Don't let the movies fool you. Reality is it can be painful. On April 15th, 1947, Jackie Robinson knew something about pain when he stepped onto Ebbett's field as the first black player in the modern Major League Baseball League. That sentence sounds historic and clean when you say it. The first black player in modern Major League Baseball. It sounds very nice. It sounds clean when we say it now, but it was anything but clean then. There were death threats sent to his home. His wife Rachel and their infant son were the targets of those threats. Can you believe that? Pitchers had already made it clear they would throw at his body, not at the bat, not at the strike zone. Some of his own teammates had circulated a petition saying they refused to share the field with him, much less the bathroom or anything else. Before he ever swung a bat, he was in he was standing inside of a social storm. That was his reality. Branch Ricky, the Dodgers executive who signed him, reportedly asked Robinson whether he had the courage, the guts, not to fight back. That question matters because it reframes what breaking a barrier sometimes actually requires. Not courage to retaliate, but the courage to absorb. The courage to regulate when every instinct in your body, mind, and spirit is screaming for revenge, is screaming for release, and is screaming to fight back and get even. Now let's talk about what that actually means biologically, because if we leave it at moral admiration, we missed the point here. When a human being is publicly insulted or excluded, the brain does not categorize that as a minor emotional inconvenience. Oh no, no, no. The ACC, which you know here we've talked about on the speak the sweet spot, the anterior cingulate cortex, it activates. Yeah, it activates the same neural region involved in processing physical pain. Think about that. Just let that land for a second. Social rejection registers as a threat to the body, and the amygdala senses and signals danger. The HPA axis that we talked about in the couple of episodes ago, the hypothalamus initiates the stress response cascade. We talked about that. The cortisol rises, the adrenaline rises, your muscles tighten and prepare, your heart rate accelerates, your body moves into defensive readiness before you've even formed a single conscious thought. This is gonna happen automatically. So when Robinson stood at the plate and heard the crowd, you better believe his nervous system did what yours would be doing in that environment. It was surging, it had to be raging, and the urge to retaliate would not have been weakness, it would have been the wiring and the appropriate response for a system under threat. The barrier was not only cultural there, it was physiological that he had to fight. And this is where most people misunderstand a word called composure. They think that composure means the absence of reaction. It doesn't. Not at all. That's as far from the truth as it could be. Composure means the reaction is present and it is mastered. Stoic Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations that the blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that's thrown into it. Where did you hear that before? Where did you hear this? The blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that's thrown in it. You heard it here on the sweet spot. We talked about that a couple of days ago. I think it was not even on Monday, on Making Moves Monday, we said be the fire. Be the kind of person who, when they throw something at you, you make flame and brightness out of it because your fire is that strong inside. Yeah. When Marcus Aurelius wrote this in Meditations, he wasn't describing denial, he was describing transformation. The fire doesn't reject what enters it, it converts it. Does that make sense? Yeah, sure it does. Make sense to me. That's the thing about a fire. You have to try to stick your hands in a fire, it's not coming out the same hand. Robinson did not eliminate the insult, he metabolized it. That is what makes this whole thing so great. Each hostile word, each deliberate pitch thrown at his body, and they were, entered a nervous system primed for reaction. But instead of exploding outward, that energy was redirected into performance, into base stealing, into focus, into showing up again and again every day. I'm not being poetic, this is not poetic exaggeration. I'm giving you what is considered from my perspective, neurological redirection. That brain redirected itself. And that's what we talk about here on When It All Wednesday. That's what we talk about on the sweet spot. When I tell you to take that deep breath, you're resetting your nervous system. When you slow down your breathing under stress and extend the exhale, like I tell you, take the deep breath in, and then slowly exhale, making the exhale longer than it was for the inhale. You activate the vagus nerve, which is a parasympathetic nervous system, and it dampens the amygdala's activity and it allows you to stay on base, it allows you to stay at bat, it allows you to stay centered. It allows your prefrontal cortex, the brain's CEO, the region responsible for strategic thinking, for self-control, for long-term decision making, to reassert control. That's how tough, mentally tough athletes today stay tough. They don't let their amygdala, they don't let their stress response, their HPA access, they don't allow it to just run the show. Like Jackie Robinson, they have emotional regulation. Yeah, regulation doesn't remove the surge of feelings you have inside, it just channels it. And that's why you you you use all that energy, you use that cortisol, use that adrenaline, use those sweaty hands and that shallow breathing and all of that to sort of remind yourself that you're more powerful now that your sympathetic nervous system has kicked in, you're more powerful now that adrenaline is flowing through you, but you're going to channel it. Robinson's greatness was not emotional numbness. No, it was repeated prefrontal override in an environment designed to provoke his amygdala to go buckwire, to provoke his limbic system to just collapse, right? So he was a picture of self-control. I'm not saying that this is okay, it's by no means okay, and I don't want to glorify that uh just because he had self-control, like how great he was. No, this is a terrible situation. But sometimes you're in a terrible situation yourself, and the one thing you have control over is you. And you cannot allow the amygdala, you cannot allow the HPA access to go unchecked. You must recontrol the moment, you must reframe the moment. Yeah. You have to have a belief, you have to have something that you hold on to. In the ancient wisdom, it says, if God is for us, this is Romans 8 31 in the message Bible, if God is for us, who can be against us, right? Right? That verse is often quoted as comfort, but there's so much psychological power inside of it. Because when an individual believes that they're backed by purpose or divine alignment, it may not be God for you, it could be something else, right? It could be just your highest belief or your purpose. When an individual believes, my point, when an individual believes that they're backed by purpose or divine alignment, you know what that does? It reframes the challenge. Yeah. Opposition is refrained from existential threat to meaningful challenge. And this is borne out on all the research on stress appraisal. You can see if you go and read on stress management and stress appraisal, you'll see. The research on stress appraisal shows that when a person interprets adversity as purpose-driven rather than a random hostility, and they attach all that to it, the body's stress response is different. Yeah, the body's stress response will shift depending on how you frame things. Your cortisol levels will be moderated, your focus will improve, your endurance will increase, belief will change your biology. There's a great book called uh The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton. I love that book. We'll talk about that another time. But my point being that your beliefs have power in the moment when your stress levels are going high, when you're facing barriers, when you're under stress, trust me, it comes down often to what you believe, because that's going to affect your biology, because it affects your amygdala, it affects your prefrontal cortex, it affects your uh anterior cingulate uh gyrus, or it affects your insulin. It affects all parts of your brain. Belief will change your biology. You see, if Robinson understood his presence on the field as larger than the hatred directed at him, which is what I suspect, then the hostility in front of that brother was no longer the defining moment. His mission was the defining moment. And when a person's mind shifts to that and is reframed like that, they're tough to beat. You're not gonna get rid of them too easy. And that reframing, that ability to reframe things, to recognize what's going on, to reframe it, and to reset yourself. The three R's, some of you know what I'm talking about. That reframing matters to you. You have that available to you this When It All Wednesday. Okay, so you're not standing in a 1947 baseball stadium. I get it. Right? Dr. Sweet, I'm not in 1947, I'm not Jackie Robinson, I'm not, you know, facing all of the racial whatever, I'm not there. But maybe you're entering a room where the temperature kind of changes when you walk in, people don't like you. Maybe you're carrying weight of being the first to do something. Maybe you're the first person to do this or that, or uh you're the only one of your kind in a scenario, and you feel a certain energy. First in your family, the first in your field, the first in your organization. Maybe you're confronting resistance that is subtle enough to be deniable, but strong enough that you feel it. Some of you know exactly what I'm talking about. Your body sometimes responds in those environments the same way Jackie Robinson's body would have responded. Heat, tension, a little bit of tightness, a little defensiveness, a little bit of an elevated heart rate, feeling that you have to focus your mind, you have to breathe. The question is not whether you will feel the surge, you certainly will. You're human, we all do when we're under stress or pressure, right? The question is whether you will let the surge dictate what you're gonna do, dictate your strategy, and this has a bearing for winning or not winning. Seneca, the stoic philosopher, observed this that difficulties strengthen the mind, just as labor does the body. He was describing adaptation, he wasn't romanticizing hardship, he wasn't saying, oh, you know, seek out difficulties. No. Muscle fibers, when you go to the gym, they tear under the load of lifting weights and they rebuild stronger. That's a physical fact. You want big muscles, you want strong muscles, you gotta go to the gym. And those fibers have to be torn, and when they build back up, they build back stronger. That's just the way it is. Neural circuits in your brain behave the same way. Each time you choose to be composed, every time you choose composure under pressure, rather than impulsive retaliation and just reacting, you reinforce a special regulatory pathway. You're not just surviving the moment, you're actually building an emotional muscle. When you do that, that kind of building is invisible, but trust me, it accumulates when you it really does. It's invisible, but it accumulates, and it helps you not, it helps you choose the right battles. Jay-Z once said, you know, a wise man told me don't argue with fools because people from a distance can't tell who is who. That's Jay-Z. And it's insightful, and it's quite strategic. When you allow yourself to be provoked, when you allow provocation to drag you into a spectacle, the narrative will shift away from your mission and towards conflict. Just it's just gonna it's just gonna come down to that conflict, and what you are all about, your mission gets sidetracked. The old folks used to say that's a trick of the devil. So don't let people provoke you. Have the self-control. You have control over your mind and your behaviors. Robinson understood that. He did, he understood that if he responded to every single insult, the experiment would be reframed as volatility rather than excellence. They would focus more on his emotional reactions than the excellence he showed on the field. Listen, let's be real. If you had the wrong kind of person up there, some other kind of person up there, and they did all that, they would and they did all of what they're gonna do to him, somebody might be waving a bat at the crowd. You know, you might have seen a whole other behavior. I don't know what I would have done. I might, I might, I might not, there might have been no um excellence to talk about. Because I might have caved. I might have caved to the emotional moment. Jackie Robinson demonstrated self-control. He let his performance be the response. He allowed sustained competence and sustained excellence to um erode the prejudice over time. It was amazing. Composure wasn't passivity in his case, his kind of composure was strength, and its influence was extended, man. It kept going. He did not back down. Sometimes when the storms rise in life and you panic, that's when the issue really becomes a problem. The response to the storm, what you do in the storm. Your response is what actually is the real problem in the storm, not even the storm itself. The ancient wisdom talks about that. Tiknyat Han, you know, a mindfulness guru, Buddhist monk, once described refugee boats fleeing Vietnam. And he said this. He said that when storms arose, if everyone in the boat panicked, the boat would capsize. And I want you to think about that for a minute. Yeah, if you're on a boat with several people and a storm hits, everybody starts freaking out and spazzing, yeah. The boat will capsize. He also noted that if one person on the boat really remained calm and centered, that the stability of that one person would help other people regulate themselves. Powerful. And this is born on Indian. Of wisdom in Christian tradition, too, right? When Jesus is on the boat. I don't know what uh what you know where it was, but like there was wasn't the one thing where Jesus was on the boat and he was sleeping, there was a storm, and everybody was like freaked out because it was this really big storm, and Jesus was actually sleeping on the boat, and they're like, dude. I mean, they didn't say like dude, but you know what I'm saying? Like, hey, what why are you sleeping? Jesus, why doth thou sleep? I don't know how they said it back then, but today it would have been like, dude, there's a storm, you're gone. Get up and like wave your hands, do your thing, right? The panic would come in. But the message is that he was sleeping, he was comfortable in the storm. The same thing that that's being said here in the Buddhist tradition, right? That you can't panic on the boat. And neuroscience is backing up the ancient wisdom. This is called, there's an actual term in neuroscience called co-regulation. Yeah, a regulated nervous system influences all of its surrounding systems. The calm, in other words, can be contagious. Your calm, your ability as a parent to be calm, your ability as a police officer to be calm, your ability as a doctor to be calm, your ability as a leader to be calm, your ability as a point guard to be calm, your ability as a coach to be calm, your ability as a trainer to be calm, your ability as a nurse to be calm. People depend on your calm. Have you been in the hospital and the nurse comes and she's so cool and relaxed, or he's so cool to relax, and and they're just so calm. Have you been with a doctor that's calm? Big difference. I don't want to be with a doctor that's freaked out when they're like, oh my god, we're gonna take you in the surgery. This is horrible. Like, oh no, you have a terrible, terrible problem here. How is that gonna feel? Yeah. Robinson's composure did not only preserve him, it modeled a different response for his teammates, for the fans, even for the culture observing him. Leadership sometimes, no, leadership often looks like emotional steadiness under visible pressure. That's what the real leaders do. The real G leaders, they are steady under pressure. Those are great leaders. You're a parent, your kids look to you for that. You're a mentor, you're a model, whatever you do. What kind of resistance are you facing right now? Sweet spotter? Is it some kind of interpersonal issue where an individual is challenging your credibility, or you're like, are you having a problem at work? Is it some kind of a teammate or something? A coach? Whatever is what's going on? Is there a structural problem that the system is not working with you? Is there some reputational thing going on? Is there some is there some illness? Is there some generational problem? What what what's your pressure? What's your barrier? Because different barriers require different strategies, but I'll tell you one thing the message here on Win It All Wednesday is that every last one of them is going to require that you regulate yourself. Like Jackie Robinson regulated himself. Like what Tik Nat Nathan said about the people on the boat not panicking, like Jesus being able to take a nap in the middle of the storm. Talk about gangster level like calm. Look, I don't know about you, but when I face stress, I do have to work on making sure that I stay composed, that I don't let my prefrontal cortex go offline and just go straight to instinctual amygdala-level responses and just react. You want to have a response, not a reaction. Jackie Robinson had a response and he never broke form. When you think of the great players across sports, they're super composed. Think of your favorite quarterback. They had it under control. Your favorite point guard, your favorite um baseball player. They're like, they have this steely calm about them, man. It's it's it's eerie. That's who you are under pressure, too, my friend. You've been listening to the sweet spot. It is win it all Wednesday, and we're in it now. We're too we're too far in to go back right now. We're in, we're in, we're locked in. We are locked in. You are a winner. You woke up a winner this morning and you're gonna go to sleep a winner tonight. If you stopped reacting and began regulating today, how much of your current resistance would lose its power over you? If you re-redirected the energy of an insult into execution like Jackie Robinson did, what would the shift look like for you over the next six months, six years, whatever? Robinson didn't dismantle baseball's color barrier in one game. The barrier eroded under the weight of sustained excellence, his commitment to that. Rookie of the year, all-star selections, hall of fame induction. The noise didn't vanish, but you know what? His consistency outlasted it. So don't focus on just getting the noise to stop, focus on your consistency, control the controllables, lock in your process, run the system that you have. I know you know what I'm talking about, and I know some of you are smiling right now. Run the system. Winning in this context is not about immediate applause. It's refusing to let opposition rewrite your identity and then somebody tell you who you are and who you're not. If you only did that today, you're already a winner. So as you move through today, and we're gonna stop right now, as soon as as you move through today, consider this. Where are you being invited to become the fire rather than the thing burning? Where is composure not weakness but strategy for you? And where might your steady influence be a light for somebody else who's struggling? Don't panic on the boat. This is the sweet spot. If this episode meets you in a place where you're carrying composure under pressure, share it with someone standing on their own threshold today. Subscribe to the sweet spot. It's free. Join me tomorrow, Dr. Sweet here, as we go in on Trust Yourself Thursday. We're going inward tomorrow, going deeper. Oh yes, we are. We will examine how stillness becomes strength and how slowing down sharpens your discernment in a world that's only rewarding speed. Oh yeah, we're going in. For science, for soul, and for success. Let's keep breaking barriers. See you tomorrow.