Okay now, welcome. Welcome to Win It All Wednesday. Not just any Wednesday, win it all Wednesday here on the Sweet Spot. Yes, my friend, you've done it. You've made it to hump day. And we're getting over the hump today. Not just any Wednesday, win it all Wednesday. Congratulations and welcome aboard the Sweet Spot. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet, I'm your host here on The Sweet Spot. It is my pleasure to be your host. As you know, I'm a board-certified psychiatrist. I work in elite and high performance circles, but the circle that I love to be in is the circle where you and I are in the same game of life, teammates making the best version of ourselves available today. So it's Win and All Wednesday, and we find ourselves in a series here called The Inner Edge. Yes, earlier this week we talked about wiring and recovery speed, and today we move into what sits underneath both of them. Because when a moment goes wrong and everyone can see it, have you ever been in that kind of scenario where you did something wrong or you messed up and everyone could see it? When a moment goes wrong and everyone can see it, something more than skill is being tested. Yeah, I've watched it happen in arenas, in conference rooms, in clinics, in the kitchen, a mistake can occur anywhere. And within seconds, the external event becomes an internal event. Within seconds, that same external event becomes an internal verdict. And I use the word verdict because that's what we give ourselves. We give ourselves a verdict when we mess up. So a player misses a shot that normally falls without a thought. A leader loses their place in mid-sentence at a big time speech. A parent loses it, snaps, and hears how they sound talking to their own kids. You know what happens in those scenarios, what unfolds next? It's not simply a reaction to the event itself. No, it's more than that. The way people feel in those moments is really the meaning that the mind, that their mind assigns to the event that's happening. It's what the brain makes it mean. The brain doesn't only process the outcomes, it's processing the implications. What does this mean for me? What are people gonna think about me? You see, that medial prefrontal cortex, which is deeply involved in how you think about yourself. They call it self-referential thinking. The brain has a part of it in this uh prefrontal cortex, it's PFC, the brain's a CEO, which really thinks about how you think about it. Yeah, that lights up. The default mode network, our good friend, the DMN, also lights up. And stress hormones, you know, from the HPA access, remember all that? We're not going into the neurophysiology. I'm just reminding you that you have a system in here called the brain, and it has parts. And these parts are involved in what you think about what happens to you or when you make a mistake, or when I make a mistake. So those stress hormones they amplify whatever interpretation is already waiting for us in the background, and the body feels all that stress because of what we're thinking about ourselves in moments where we mess up or things don't go well. And here's an interesting thing about Win It All Wednesday that's very important if you're an athlete, you're a performer, or somebody who's in front of people all the time. If your identity is tightly fused to your performance, and your identity and your performance are the same thing, then any disruption you feel will feel like exposure. Any disruption can feel like exposure. When performance equals worth, when what you do is who you are, the mistake is going to register bigger. The mistake registers as a threat, right? In those scenarios, because who you are and what you do is the same thing. When the nervous system senses threat, your ability to regulate your body, your mind, even your spirit can weaken. And your ability to function and perform can spiral down. This is why two people can experience the same setback and have two completely different divergent reactions super quickly. One person calibrates, the other spazzes. One recalibrates themselves in the moment when the mistake or the issue occurs, the other one returns to some kind of childhood thing where they just lose it, they spiral and they start ruminating. And the difference is really talent. It's not about talent, it's about your identity and how stable the identity is. Because lots of times there is a choice into how we're going to react, right? Victor Frankel, the author, said between a stimulus and a response, there's a space, and in that space is our power to choose our response. Lots of times, as we said yesterday, things happen fast. The reaction happens well before the response. But in our response, that's where your growth and your freedom actually exist. Not in the reaction. Sometimes the reaction is just too fast. The space between the stimulus, whatever the trigger is, and your response to it, that space becomes really narrow when you feel threatened. It becomes really, really small when you feel upset or angry. Your nervous system will collapse that distance between the event and the reaction when it believes something else is on the line, when it feels threatened. So when somebody's screaming at you or yelling at you, or somebody blows up at you lots of times, it's because their nervous system has collapsed the space between the stimulus and the response. So you do something like you move a pen, and the person goes, What the heck? Why did you move my pen? You idiot! Whatever. All that, that's response. Alright, that's stimulus response. The stimulus was that you just moved the pen. This response or reaction was this catastrophic thing. You know what? In between that, stimulus and response, their nervous system collapsed the distance because they felt a threat. And something unconscious or subconscious was going on with that person, or even yourself when you had these kinds of reactions. You know, Carl Jung, the very famous uh psychiatrist, said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you're gonna call it fate, you're gonna call it chance, you're gonna call it something else, but it's really your unconscious. Pressure, my friend, pressure has a way of surfacing these unconscious scripts that we don't even realize we've been rehearsing or that are lurking under our conscious surface. So if you have an unconscious script that says something like this, I always mess up, or I can I can't be seen as weak, I can't miss the shot. Something bad is gonna happen to me. If these are the what's going on, well, those are not neutral statements, they're identity claims, and your body is organizing itself around these thoughts that you have, and your body is organizing itself around this fear, and when stress comes, you kind of default to your wiring. That makes sense? We talk about that on Monday, right? You default to your wiring. So sometimes we're suffering unnecessarily because we there's nothing wrong. We're just interpreting it really bad. We just have a way that we interpret things. You know, in the Buddhism, they talk about the Adana. There's a line that says, There is suffering, but no sufferer is found. Let that land. There is suffering, but no sufferer is found. The event occurred, the event exists, and the discomfort, okay, it exists too. But the story that we put around it, the story that the event has around it, the way this person defines and relates this event, that's not required. That's the part that we have to think through. Yes, I moved your pen. Yes, that's your favorite pen, and yes, you'd like it to be in a certain place, but that reaction of losing your marbles over it, that's not required. Okay, when that distinction becomes real rather than theoretical, you are able to control your nervous system because you realize I have a menu of responses here. I have a menu of reactions that I can have, and that can settle me down. Even when you're going through stress, if you let your prefrontal cortex and your mind think it through that this can make me better, I can gain from this, there are ways in which you don't have to respond catastrophically to every stress that comes. Now, don't get me wrong, we all have stresses that sometimes a catastrophic response is required. But for the most part, you can grow and endure and you can become better. In fact, in the message Bible in James 1:4, it says, so let it grow. For when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete and needing nothing. There's something about trials and tribulations and stresses that if you navigate them and you work through them, not during the adversity, but sometimes after, we say, you know what, I got stronger as a result. Yeah, sometimes remaining in the experience without turning it into a verdict makes you more mature and it makes you stronger. You know what the old folks say, right? The that does what that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Let's bring this home. Think about a basketball player at the free throw line who misses twice in a really big moment, right? On the surface, all that's happened is that the shot was missed. She missed the shot. Oh, he missed the shot. Two points are lost. That's it. But internally, a sentence may form in their mind that sounds something like this. Man, I always choke when it counts. That sentence alters the person's breathing, it tightens the muscles around their neck, their jaw, it narrows what they can see. They're in a tight ball now because they just said something to themselves. And the next possession is not influenced by the mechanics, but the identity threat that they just experienced. That's why sometimes you see somebody miss 10 shots in a row or a slump happens and they can't get out of it, right? The identity remains stable, right? But the interpretation around it keeps changing and they can't access that stable identity. So the body can't recalibrate and they miss 10 shots in a row. When identity fuses with the mistake, the body defends the ego instead of executing the skill. You know, that's what happens. The body just gets connected to the ego and it's trying to figure it out. So you don't want to fuse your identity with your performance. Yeah, because your nervous system reacts primarily to the meaning rather than to the event itself. It's the meaning that you give it that creates your stress and my stress. If the meaning assigned is catastrophic or personal or in some global way, it becomes harder to self-regulate. It becomes harder to be uh a closer, to execute. But if you have a stable meaning, if you're not if you're not attached to the outcome, if you see yourself as a little bit different than the task you're doing, you can tolerate a miss or a mistake, come back and notice you have a completely new opportunity. So as you move through the day today on when it all went, I want you to notice what kind of interpretation you're giving things if something doesn't go your way. I want you to listen to yourself. Listen to what you're telling yourself. What message are you sending? Are you allowing the inner edge to take you to a place where I'm no good or I've messed up? What do they think about me? Or are you defending the inner edge and saying, hey, I have a new opportunity, I have another chance. This does not define me. Because when the identity remains grounded, the wiring will support your recovery, it will support how you rebound to things, it will make you feel like I have this is not who I am. I can do more, I can be better the next time. But when the identity is fragile, the wiring is gonna start protecting the ego, and the performance is gonna be the secondary thing, and then it's gonna be a lot of fear. So that's the idea today on When It All Wednesday Sweet Spoter. You try to not allow the stimulus response thing to be automatic. You step back and recognize okay, that didn't work out for me, that didn't go well, but that's not who I am. I'm gonna fix that. I can get that done. Another pathway can open up for you. That's what makes you a winner. Winners aren't made only because you win every game. Winners are made because even if you lose a game, you're still a winner because you have another chance. And that's what Win It All Wednesday is about here on the sweet spot where you guard your edge. This is your edge. You're not letting your identity fuse with the mistake. The mistake isn't you. Ha ha, there we go. You've been listening to the sweet spot. This is Win It All Wednesday, and you're born to win. And if you didn't win, you'll win again tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow, tomorrow is Trust Yourself Thursday, and I'm looking forward to seeing you there. I'm looking forward to building trust with you. If this registered with you today, please share it. Uh, and then if you haven't subscribed, subscribe so we can build this community, this community of people who protect the edge. I'll see you tomorrow for science, for soul, for success.