On The Suite Spot, sports psychiatrist Dr. Derek H. Suite, MD brings together neuroscience, performance psychology, spiritual wisdom, and lessons from elite sport...practical tools for the people who can't afford to choke when the pressure rises.
Built for athletes, executives, military professionals, first responders, coaches, clinicians, and anyone carrying real weight, each episode sharpens focus, builds resilience, and helps you manage pressure, recover well, and sustain momentum.
This is where the conversation moves beyond motivation into the habits, mental skills, and deeper questions that shape performance across mind, body, and spirit.
For science, for soul, for success...this is The Suite Spot.
We treat self-care like a performance system, not an indulgence, and we challenge the belief that rest steals time from productivity. We use stories from Vince Carter, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar to show how recovery, boundaries, and neutral thinking make success sustainable.
Suite Spots: • self-care as performance rather than a break from it • Vince Carter’s longevity habits as strategic recovery • sleep, rest, hydration, nutrition, boundaries, emotional recovery as entry fees • the “recovery tax” question and what it reveals about your habits • Mary J. Blige on learning to care about yourself first • Kendrick Lamar on changing yourself before changing the world • neutral thinking and a negativity diet as mental self-care tools • three Saturday questions for body needs, mental load, and boundary setting
Take your self-care Saturday seriously. I’ll see you tomorrow for Slowdown Sunday. Follow me !
Greetings and welcome. Welcome back to the Sweet Spots. You know what's really special about today? Saturday, Self-Care Saturday? Here on the Sweet Spot, we recognize that more than likely, this will not happen again. This moment is the moment for you and me. This is our moment. This is our self-care Saturday. How are we gonna take care of ourselves? How are we gonna do whatever it takes to make sure that we are living the best life ever? I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm your host here on The Sweet Spot where we blend science, soul, and success. Yes, beloved, yes, sweet spotter, this is Self Care Sadly. And before you skip past this one thinking that this is just some soft episode, stay with me a while. Because we've been in a series here. A series about a great book, It Takes What It Takes, by Trevor Moad. Moad taught me about self-care because when I read his work, I recognized that his message about self-care was really deep. He was basically saying that self-care will permanently change how we think. That when we are involved in self-care, it's not a break from performance, it is performance. I'm gonna say that again because many of you out there are athletes or artists or performers, many of you are in high-pressure jobs, several of you are in really stressful situations, and the self-care can sometimes feel like it's a break from everything you have to do to just get some self-care in. What I'm saying is, based on what I've read in this great book, It Takes What It Takes from Trevor Moad is that self-care is not a break from performance, it is the performance. And we're gonna show you exactly what that means
today. I want to start with Vince Carter, NBA player, who played 22 seasons in the NBA for different decades. I don't think many players in league history have ever done what Vince Carter did. And when the author of this book, Trevor Moad, sat with him, sat with Vince Carter in 2015 and asked Vince whether choice was an illusion or not, whether we have a choice or we don't have a choice. Vince Carter answered immediately. Of course it was, he said. You know what he did? He did everything that was demanded of him. So Vince Carter believed that choice wasn't even real, that it's an illusion. And when he told the author of this book, It Takes What It Takes by Trevor Moad, when he told Trevor Moad this, that phrase that choice is an illusion, that you don't really have a choice. You have to do whatever it takes. It stayed with the author. Vince Carter did what was demanded. He didn't do what felt good, he didn't do what was convenient. He did whatever it takes, whatever the outcome required. And Carter, Vince Carter, this guy was at the facility in the training room by 6:30 a.m. Mostly ahead of everybody else. And don't you always see that the greats always seem to arrive earlier than you? Or me? Yeah, it's it's sort of odd, like the really great ones are obsessed. He monitored his diet, he stopped dunking in the game unnecessarily because every extra dunk that he did he said was taxing his knees, and he couldn't keep paying that tax. Vince did extra recovery work after games when everybody else went home. Isn't that another trait of the greats? That they are the last to leave, the first to arrive. You and I would do well to emulate that level of commitment. And that, my friend, that sweet builder is self-care in Trevor Moad's world. It's strategic, self-care is intentional, and self-care, as we've said before, is non-negotiable. Yeah. Because it's what's demanded of you to be at your very best. And it doesn't matter if you're a pro-athlete, a top actor or entertainer, or a business person, you could be at home doing homebound kinds of activities. To be your best,
you will have to eventually stop whatever the task is, if it's even polishing the silverware, just to give yourself a break so that you can come back and polish that silverware into the best polish ever. So here is the reframe I want you to carry today on Self Care Saturday. Sleep, rest, nutrition, boundaries, emotional recovery. These are key elements of self-care. They're not rewards, these are the entry fees that we have to pay. You don't get sustained performance without paying these. Vince Carter understood that at 38 years old. Remember, this dude, okay, this dude played 22 seasons in the NBA. He paid his entry fees, sleep, rest, nutrition, boundaries, emotional recovery. You don't get sustained performance, beloved, without paying these taxes. So the question is, do you pay your taxes? Not your income taxes. I'm talking about your recovery tax.
You know, Mary J. Blige, you know her, the queen of hip hop soul. Nine Grammy Awards. Rock and roll Hall of Fame inductee. A woman who rebuilt herself from the ground up. She said it from the inside out. You know what she said? I care about me now. When I didn't care about me, I was like, why is this going wrong? Why is my life so bad? But when you don't care about yourself, nobody is going to care about you. So I learned to love myself, even if nobody else was going to. Yeah, like she said, but when you don't care about yourself, nobody else is gonna care about you. So I learned to love myself even if nobody else was going to. It was a survival choice. That wasn't a soft self-care choice. And then it became her performance choice. And look at what Mary J. Blige accomplished. Yeah. A lot of self-care starts with really taking a good, long, hard look in the mirror and making whatever changes you need to make to
take care of you. Kendrick Lamar, remember him? You know him, Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most international artists of his generation. He said it in a 2015 NPR interview with David Green, speaking about what he was learning about himself. This is what Kendrick Lamar said. The message I'm sending to myself is this I can't change the world until I change myself first. You see, even in there, there's this theme of self-care. Self-care as a prerequisite, not a reward, not an indulgence, but a prerequisite. The foundation that makes everything else sustainable. You and I cannot pour from an empty cup. At some point, the cup wins. Okay? We can't pour from an empty cup. So we gotta make sure we're filling ourselves up. A lot of the high performers I work with, they resist self-care for one of two reasons. One is that rest feels like it's time stolen from productivity. Have you ever been like that? I know I I tend to be like that sometimes. I feel like if I'm resting, I'm not being productive. Or the other thing is that they swing the opposite way and fully check out. And and and so either extreme is not good, right? So Moab, the author, rejects both extremes.
He says the real self-care lives in the neutral zone that we've been building all week. We've been talking about staying in the neutral zone. And we have to ask the behavioral question. Do you remember that from earlier this week? We talked about the behavioral question, the same one we've been using all week. Not how do I feel? Right? What do I do? Right? So that's important that we understand that we have to do this. You've got to ask, what does my body actually need right now? What does my mind actually need right now? And cut through to the truth. And remember, we talked about a negativity diet that the author Moad research had researched. And he said, don't try to just add a whole lot of positive talk over what you're feeling. Just put in less negative things. He said that less negative input is far more powerful than any positive thinking program you're gonna layer on top of what you're going through. Really take a moment and step back in your life and look at this and say, hey, you know what? Where am I being negative? And don't try to try to say something positive over it. Just be less negative. How can I be less negative? That's what he's talking about. Because in the book, he's making this analogy that if you're in a car and you want to go from reverse to drive, you gotta go through neutral first. You gotta get to neutral. Because from neutral, you'll know if you need to be in reverse, park, drive, whatever. You gotta get to neutral. And so he wants us to think neutrally, to not have emotional baggage over everything, get to neutral. And with self-care, that makes so much sense because we take in so much toxic negativity all week long that we do have to spend a moment thinking about whether we're in overdrive, whether we're in park, whether we're in reverse, get to neutral. Does
that make sense? I know it does. So curate what's yeah, curate what's going into your mind today. Curate it. Look at it with the same intentionality you would apply to what's going into your body, to what you're gonna eat. The ancient wisdom calls the body a temple, it doesn't call it a machine that runs until it breaks. The ancient wisdom sees the body as a temple, something that you stood with intelligence because of what lives inside your body, your soul, your spirit, who you are, the essence of you, what makes you such an amazing human being. That's right, that's right. That's why you have to do whatever it takes to make sure you care for all of you.
So here's your Saturday practice. I'm gonna give you three questions. Very easy, very honest. I'd like you to say them out loud with me. One is what does my body genuinely need today? I want you to reflect on it. What does my body genuinely need today? Take a breath. Relax and just think about that for a second. When was the last time you asked that question? Is it sleep? Is it hydration? Is it movement? Is it stillness? Name it. Name what you need and then do it. Don't do it later. Today's self-care Saturday. Today you do it. Today you put you first. Today everybody else can wait. Goodness knows they've been on you all week. Goodness knows you've been doing it. You've been doing your thing. I see you. I get you. But today, what does your body need? Genuinely need today? That's question one. I told you there were three questions. I'm gonna give you the second one right now. What is the one thing from this week your mind needs to put down? To just lay down. What is the one thing from this week your mind needs to set down? Think about it. Just think about it. It's just something you just need to put it down for a second. You've been running with it, it's on your mind, it's it's it's going everywhere with you. I want you to name it and I want you to leave it here. You know what? It'll be there for you on Making Moose Monday. It'll be there for you on Making Moose Monday, right? So let's leave it here for a second. This is self-care Saturday. If it still needs attention, it'll be there on Monday. But today it's not gonna rob you of the whole day. We're reclaiming territory today. You're taking back your Saturday. That's part of self-care. Do you know self-care could be seen as a bit of a revolutionary moment? Oh yeah. This could be your protest against the world. I am gonna take care of me. So, question one What does my body genuinely need today? Question two, what is one thing from this week that I'm gonna put down or set down? And I told you there were three questions. I'm gonna give you the third.
Where did I give peace away this week to keep somebody else comfortable? Yeah, think about that. Where did you give your peace away this week to keep somebody else happy or comfortable or to not ruffle their feathers? Yeah, what is one boundary you can set starting today so that next week doesn't cost you as much? Think about that. Another way that I like to ask that question is don't set well, I'm gonna not even call it a question, I'm gonna just put it out there. Don't set yourself on fire so other people could stay warm. So look at those three questions, my sweet builder, my friend, and think them through because whatever it takes is what it takes.
And this series we've been working on all week is it takes what it takes. And today, what it takes is this. Take your recovery as seriously as you take your performance, as seriously as you take your work. Because you know what, sweet spotter? They're the same thing, and that's the revelation that we really have to grasp this self-care Saturday. That my recovery and your recovery is not something that's nice to have that we do after we do the work. It is the reason we can do the work, is that we put it in recovery time. Build a recovery system for yourself, take it seriously. Vince Carter did not play 22 seasons by accident. Mary J. Blige did not rebuild herself by giving everything away and keeping nothing for herself. And Kendrick, Kendrick Lamar does not change the world without first doing the inside work. They all pay the entry fee. The entry fee of sleep, of hydration, of nutrition, of having boundaries, regulating the emotions, putting yourself first. Even on the airplane, I know you know this one. What do they tell you to do with the oxygen mask before you put it on somebody else? Put it on you. So you can put it on the child, so you can put it on your husband or your wife or your children or whatever it is that you you or whoever you care about, put it on you first. Saturday, self-care Saturday, is your entry fee for next week. You're listening to the sweet spot. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. You're listening to Science, Soul, and Success.
You're in the synthesis, and I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad that you and I are getting to unpack Trevor Mohad's book, It Takes What It Takes. And you've been amazing. Your listening has been intense. I could feel you listening. I know you're there, I could see it. Amen. So, tomorrow, sweet Sparter, tomorrow is Slowdown Sunday, the finale of this book that we've done. We're gonna close the week out. We'll close the week and the series, the way the author Moad closes his entire philosophy. With stillness, reset, and the one question that sets up Monday better than anything else you could do tonight. So, look, take your self-care Saturday seriously. Go breathe, go relax, go listen to some song or music that you like, treat yourself to something you deserve it. Take a deep breath for science, for soul, and for success. This is the sweet spot. Much love to you, this self-care Saturday, and I'll see you tomorrow for Slowdown Sunday. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet, and I'm out of the
