Episode 6 - Olympians don’t force focus. They train THIS instead

This week on Call Her Brilliant

• We’re celebrating the ruthlessly dedicated weirdos that are our Olympic champions. And I’m spilling the secrets these obsessive perfectionists know about creating a sharper brain (so you can hijack their superpowers and get more accomplished than most people think is humanly possible).

• Can swearing help you be as mentally tough as Lindsay Vonn, why this bad habit might be your new back pocket secret if you want to be able to persevere when you’ve had 7 failed business launches in a row

TRANSCRIPT

This week on Call Her Brilliant, I'm celebrating the ruthlessly dedicated weirdos that are our Olympic champions, and spilling the secrets these obsessive perfectionists know about creating a sharper brain, so you can hijack their superpowers and get

more accomplished than most people think is humanly possible. Can swearing help you be as mentally tough as Lindsay Vonn?

Why this bad habit might be your new back pocket secret if you want to be able to persevere when you've had seven failed business launches in a row? Let's do this.

Welcome to Call Her Brilliant, the podcast for ambitious women building businesses and lives that refuse to be average.

You got the gold stars, and turn that grit into step-by-step success, but you're ready for more, if only your capacity wasn't the bottleneck. You want focus, freedom, and a brain that can actually keep up with your ambition.

That's more than mindset, more than strategy. From athletes to entrepreneurs, we're trading burnout for peak performance science, so you can create a life that's brilliant by design. I have Olympic fever this week.

Honestly, since I was 12, I've been kind of obsessed with the Olympics. I consider the 96 Olympics as my origin story. Watching the American Women's Gymnastics Team win gold probably shaped my life.

It for sure shaped my adolescent brain. When Carrie Strug landed her second vault on one leg and then got carried to the awards ceremony by her coach because her leg was super busted and all taped up, I thought, this is strength.

This is who I want to be. I had dreams of getting Olympic rings tattooed when I eventually made Team Canada. Which, to be honest, was never going to happen.

I did sports. I did competitive gymnastics at a fairly high level. I was training 20 plus hours a week all through high school.

But I am also very clumsy. I have random bruises all the time. No clue how I got them.

And most of my family stories are about how I have fallen and got myself hurt or almost really got myself hurt because I'm really good at falling since I do it all the time. I rarely get severely injured, which is good.

But it was my secret childhood dream. As a lifelong perfectionist, I never actually said it out loud, but I absolutely had daydreams of standing on that podium and holding my country's flag.

And as an adult whose most athletic moment of the day is moving from my desk to my couch, I still love the Olympics. It is so fun to watch them succeed, to see how hard these athletes have worked.

And I get unnaturally invested in their backstories and really want all of them to win and do their absolute best. I love the last few Olympics even more because all the athletes are on social media.

And it is super fun to watch the videos of them opening up their swag, their team bags, and trying on all their clothes and seeing which ones look utterly ridiculous, like those weird, I don't even know what it was, like half a sleeping bag things

that the Canadians wore to the opening ceremonies. I love watching them parade them around. I love watching them trade pins. I loved all the videos from Paris of the cardboard beds.

I love watching it all. And then I saw this post the other day from this writer that I follow named Jonathan Edward Durham. His Instagram handle, by the way, is this one over here.

Totally follow him. He is hilarious. So funny.

I laugh regularly at his posts. But anyways, it was a post about how apparently a Spanish figure skater got approved to do a Minions-themed routine.

And his comment was that he loves to watch the Olympics so much because it's the world's biggest celebration of ruthlessly dedicated weirdos. And I totally agree. And I am so here for that.

I will watch any sport, even the ones that I really have no clue what's actually going on, especially at the Winter Olympics, because what they do is not just crazy athletic. It's pretty dangerous, right?

I was watching the speed clock the other day for these downhill skiers, and they're going like 130 plus kilometers per hour down this icy hill. I was watching women's freestyle ski slope style. I think I said that wrong.

I don't even know if that was right. But you know what I mean. Where they go down on skis, but then they go on the rails and the jumps like snowboarders do.

Half of them start facing backwards, which seems absolutely insane to me. And then they twist from backwards on to these rails, and then twist off and land backwards again. Absolutely bananas.

Incredible. I can't even ski backwards down the bunny hill without plummeting out of control. I also have no clue what the announcers are talking about when they talk about corks and grabs.

But I love every minute watching it.

5:13

Athlete Mental Edge

Because athletes have a special brilliance. You've heard me talk before about how athletes train not just their bodies, they spend time intentionally training their brains, their minds.

High level athletes, like Olympic athletes, who regularly mentally visualize their routines, perform better at competition time.

So the elite skier who mentally rehearses what she's going to do on those rails and those jumps is more likely to perform better when she goes to compete.

The basketball player who practices mentally their shots is more likely to hit that shot when they go to competition time.

Even when we test athletes, when we hook them up to monitors that monitor everything from their skin conductivity to their brain waves, and we have them mentally visualize their performance, like swimmers picture in their heads what it feels like to

be hitting the perfect stroke, what it's going to be like when they push off the wall. We monitor their body and their brain, their brains and their bodies react if they're actually doing the event.

The brains think they're actually swimming because they're so good at this mental rehearsal.

Athletes also know where to obsess, where it's a good thing to be a bit of a perfectionist, where they can feel that they can push their bodies beyond what most of us can really imagine is possible, and they do.

Have you ever seen a marathon runner collapse when they get across the finish line? They get wrapped up in a blanket right away, right? Because their body's actually shutting down.

They've pushed themselves so hard. But a few feet earlier, they're running like it's no problem, right? It's an amazing thing that they're able to do.

I don't think this is a bad thing. I actually think we've swung a little bit too far away from hustle culture. Yes, working crazy hours, pushing ourselves beyond what is sustainable is not great.

But we've leaned a bit too hard into this self-care, sunshine and rainbows, we should feel good and be happy all the time. Honestly, BS. Because we're not supposed to be happy all the time.

We're not supposed to feel good all the time. Our brain and our bodies need a bit of a challenge. We need that resistance.

And sports does something pretty magical to our brains. They train them for leadership. I was reading stats that 94% of women in highly ranked executive positions played sports before.

52% of female executives played sports at the college level.

7:49

Lindsay Vonnʼs Genius

That's why today I want to talk about Lindsay Vonn. And she's this week's Smart Women Doing Smart Things. Smart Women Doing Smart Things.

Lindsay Vonn, American skier, 41 years old, Olympic gold medalist at the 2010 Olympics. She won a record eight World Cup skiing titles most recently in 2015. Then she retired for a few years because of injuries.

Before returning to competitive skiing in 2024, when she became the oldest downhill skiing World Cup winner at 41 and qualified for the Olympics in Milan, Cortino.

The Internet and the Couch Potato Experts had a lot to say about her before the Olympics. I hadn't really heard about her before this Olympics, honestly. I am Canadian, I do like skiing, but I don't follow it in between the Olympics.

I absolutely watch as many of the Olympic events as I can, but I don't know a lot about who's who or who's supposed to do well. But I sure heard about her as the Olympics got closer.

Because she tore her ACL a week before the Olympics started, and everyone was judging her.

According to the Internet, she was either a hero for being 41 and coming back to sports, like she's some geriatric superstar when she's only 41, and isn't she amazing for doing this with an injury?

Or they're saying she's a total idiot, and she's going to ruin her life because she's 41 after all, and she's just going to get hurt. Lindsay Vonn ignores them all, as she should.

Well, she probably didn't totally ignore them because it was all over, and I'm sure it was really hard to ignore, but she did her best. She gets to the Olympics Friday and Saturday. I guess she zipped through her official training runs.

No major problems. Sunday, it's the final. She pushes off the start.

Fans have been lining up for hours to cheer her on. 12.5 seconds into her final run, she crashes. And not just a little fall, she cartwheels down the hill.

Their skis are set at this level so they don't pop off. They're really tight, so they're like glued to her boots. And if you've ever fallen skiing and your skis are still on, you know how awkward and uncomfortable it is.

And she's laying there on the hill, and she doesn't get up. She had to be airlifted off by a helicopter, apparently taken to hospital for surgery because she had a complex tibia fracture. And more of the armchair experts start spewing their thoughts.

Maybe she wasn't healed. Maybe she's too old. Maybe she shouldn't have done this.

Lindsay Vonn had to actually issue a statement to stop all the speculation. She says, it wasn't her ACL, it was fine. What happened, she made a mistake.

She turned too sharp and she caught her arm on the flag, which we all saw that happen, right? I saw it right away, and I am absolutely no expert in skiing, but you can see her catch her arm, and it spun her around and she crashed.

She says she has no regrets, nor should she. If she had finished that race, even if she hadn't won, she would have been hailed as a hero.

11:05

Brain Body Connection

Instead, everybody on the internet is questioning her decisions, because they don't have Lindsay Vonn's genius, the specific genius of elite athletes.

That genius, a deep knowledge of her own body, and more importantly, how the connection between her brain and her body is not linear. Pain is a great illustration of this complex interaction. Imagine this for a second.

You're racing to get ready in the morning and you stub your toe.

You're running late, kids are dawdling, you spilled your coffee and you're out of milk, and I'm sitting there trying not to use my angry voice as I tell my eight-year-old for the fifth time to put her bloody boots on, and then I stub my toe on the

table. How different does that feel than on the weekend when I'm at my daughter's cheerleading competition, their team has this amazing performance, I'm so excited, I'm jumping up and down, we go down to meet the kids when they're done, I bump my hip

trying to squeeze through the stands. Remember, I'm very clumsy. It hurt, but I basically ignored it, right? Until the next day, I'm showering and I touch the bruise and I'm like, oh yeah, that happened.

Pain feels different depending on the circumstances. Stubbing my toe when I'm rushed and I'm stressed feels a lot different than when I'm distracted and excited, right? We've all had those experiences.

Athletes train their bodies and their minds, so they know their unique upper limit. Most of us do not. In fact, we grossly under estimate what we're capable of.

For example, this is one of my favorite research studies. So there was a study where they brought in participants and they hooked them up to fake EEG machines. They put these caps on their head.

They looked like they had fancy electrodes on them, but the caps weren't real. They didn't actually do anything. They weren't real electrodes.

They weren't recording brainwaves. But they pretended. They were.

The researchers pretended. They hooked them up to a computer. They showed participants the computer, and they said, this cap and this computer are measuring your brainwaves.

Remember, it didn't. That part was fake. And then they told them, this computer is gonna tell you if you had a good night's sleep or not.

Also fake. And they divided them into two groups. Group number one, they told those people that their brainwave analysis said they had a good sleep the night before.

It was really high quality sleep. Group number two, they told them that they had a bad sleep the night before. Really low quality sleep.

Remember, that part was just made up. They didn't actually test their sleep. They just told them that they did.

What they did next was they had participants do a bunch of different cognitive tasks. And what they found was that the group that was told they had a good sleep did better on the tasks of things like speed, focus, and problem solving.

Nothing was different about their actual sleep. All that was different was what they were told about their sleep quality. Because that connection between our brain and our body is not straight forward.

And that can either help us, like elite athletes, or it can work against us and burn us out. So, I spent over a decade now working with high achieving women who are recovering from burnout.

Smart women, successful women, women who haven't learned this type of genius. They haven't been taught to harness this brain body connection. Because what were most of us taught?

To shove it all down and keep going. It's a genius to know with absolute precision what you're capable of. Not just physically, but mentally too.

Our brains like to put up resistance. It is meant to keep us safe. Our brains like to stop us before we can fail.

We've all had that experience, right? Where we talk ourselves out of taking a risk. Whether it's in business, in love, in a family, in finances.

Because we worry about the risks. Most of us grew up in a culture where failure was something to be avoided. Especially those of us who grew up in the 90s, right?

We got marks in school, we had standardized exams, we got awards for perfect attendance and perfection, and they were cutting arts programs all over the place.

Really heavy emphasis on STEM programs, which is not a bad thing, but we need some balance, right? We grew up in this environment where our brains learned that we needed to be perfect all the time, that mistakes are not acceptable.

And so to avoid those mistakes, our brains will take us out of the game before we even have a chance to succeed or fail. Because my brain says, I want to start this new career, but what if I'm not smart enough? Or what if I fail the entrance exam?

Or what if I put in all of this work and I can't get a job or I can't get my business started, and all of it was for nothing? What if I try and I fail?

That is the core defense that our brain has that really holds us back from taking risks in so many areas of our life. Because we've been raised with this expectation that failure is a bad thing, that making mistakes are a bad thing.

I know, I remember every single time I've had a horrible failure, whether it's in my business or in my life, if I can recount in vivid detail exactly what happened and exactly how that felt, I am terrible at remembering my successes. Most of us are.

Every year, at the end of the year, I've started making it a habit of going through, instead of doing a vision board, I do a brilliance board, I call it, where I reflect back on all my wins in different areas of my life, not just business, but my

health and my family and hobbies and all these things that I'm really working towards. It is hard to remember those wins. It is really easy to remember those failures. If you want a great test of this, pause this for a minute and do this right now.

List five mistakes you've made this week, then go list five things you've done well this week. I'm willing to bet it is a lot easier to comp those mistakes than it is those victories. That is what our brains have learned.

That is how they've been wired. And it is something that elite athletes, especially athletes that are very successful for a long time, have learned to rewire.

Athletes are not only mentally tough, the best ones are mentally fit, which means they can hold space for mistakes. They can do the reps. They can give themselves a chance to mess up.

We've all heard that famous quote from Michael Jordan saying that he missed 9,000 shots in his career and that 26 times he was trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. Michael Jordan, best of the best in the 90s.

He even got to be in a movie with Bugs Bunny, which I love. Athletes, the greatest ones, the true geniuses in their sport. They know they're going to mess up.

They don't love it. No one likes to miss. No one likes to fall.

But they're willing to take the shot because they know they've wired their brain to understand the more they miss, the closer they get to a hit. Lindsay Vonn knows this. She knows what her unique body is capable of.

She's trained her brain to harness that connection to its fullest, and she's willing to make mistakes and not beat herself up for it. That's why she's this week's Smart Women Doing Smart Things. Smart Women Doing Smart Things.

Side quest here for a second. The Lindsay Vonn story is not the same as the Carrie Struggs story. I still love the Carrie Struggs story.

Like I said, it was really my origin story. It might end up being my villain origin story, depending how life goes here, but it really did change how I understand that connection between our brains and our bodies and what we are capable of.

Lindsay Vonn, though, is 41. At the 96 Olympics, when Carrie Struggs pushed herself to compete on a busted leg so she could win gold for her team, she was 18. That is not the same thing.

Our brains aren't fully developed until our mid to late 20s.

Those complex skills, decision making, being able to accurately weigh pros and cons, being able to inhibit the stuff that we want to do for the things that are good for us, and that mind-body connection are not fully intact at 18. You know that.

I know that. When I was 18, I didn't know that pickles were made from cucumbers. For real, I thought pickle was like its own vegetable.

I learned that in graduate school. Thank god social media and smartphones were not a thing when I was that age.

I got my first cell phone I think when I was 23, and it was one of those flip phones where you had to go like 111-333 and so on to text, because I did some dumb stuff. Our brains get smarter as we age. We gain knowledge.

We gain wisdom. I might not be as fast as I was at 21, but I am definitely sharper, and you are too.

20:48

Pain Management Hacks

Okay, now it's time for neuroscience for 90s kids. Neuroscience for 90s kids. While we're talking about the Olympics, it got me thinking about all the weird ways our brains manage pain.

So here are two fun brain facts that you can use even if you're not an Olympic athlete. Next time you stub your toe, rub it out. The pain.

I mean, rub out the pain. This is based on something called the gate control theory of pain. To put it simply, imagine you stub your toe.

There are these sensory receptors in your toe that are going to send signals to your spinal cord and up to your brain that recognize pain.

Gate control theory says there's essentially this gate in your spine that either opens or closes to send that signal up to your brain.

If there's a competing signal like from touch or pressure sensors in your toe, as in if you're gently massaging it after you stub it, the theory is that those sensory processes close the gate so you feel less pain. Here's the flip side.

Things like stress, anxiety, and focusing on the pain can open the gate and make the pain feel more intense because pain isn't a linear process. There are many factors that influence how our brains perceive that pain.

So next time you bump into a counter, give that hip a gentle rub for a few seconds. It could help. Or this one's even more fun, swear.

We told our eight-year-old the only time she's allowed to swear is when she hurts herself. But I did have to subsequently explain that her feelings and pinching her finger in the door are different kinds of pain.

Swearing does help with acute pain management. There was a 2009 study done in the UK that asked college students to keep their hand in a bucket of ice water for as long as they could. Half of them were told to swear the whole time.

Half were said just to repeat a neutral word like cup. The ones who swore, they could hold their hand in the water longer than the ones who said other words. Because the circuits linked to emotion are also tired to swearing profanity.

When we swear, our heart rate goes up, which is a good sign that that emotional center in your brain, your amygdala is activated. By swearing when we're in pain, it brings out a stronger emotional reaction, which in this case is a good thing.

Because those emotional centers are survival centers, the ones that evolved to keep us safe. Here's the thing, it has to be a real curse word though. You can't just yell made up words.

A 2020 study tested using a real curse word, like fuck, versus made up words like fouch or twizpy, versus neutral words like how you would describe a table, like solid.

Then they had participants put their hand in ice water again and repeat one of the words over and over again. Participants that had the real swear words could last seven seconds longer than the made up swears or neutral words. Here's the caveat.

You get the best benefit from swearing when you have pain if you don't swear regularly. If you're someone who swears all the time, it doesn't seem to work. It's like your brain, the benefits wear off.

This has been Neuroscience for 90s Kids. Neuroscience for 90s Kids.

24:17

Cold Plunge Benefits

While we're on the subject of ice baths, let's do a quick round of brain fact or brain fluff. Brain fact or brain fluff. Where we separate neuroscience from nonsense, whether that viral brain hack is backed by any science or just Instagram glitter.

Today's challenger, cold plunges. The idea that if you jump in a tub of ice water, it will do everything from banished wrinkles to fix your focus. But do cold plunges actually make you more productive?

Here's a science. Some studies have found that immersing yourself in cold water can have short-term brain benefits. It can surge dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that can improve motivation, at least sometimes.

It's not that direct and straightforward either. Cold plunges can also boost norepinephrine, which is like adrenaline, increase your energy and focus, and it can reduce cortisol, which is a stress hormone.

But the effects aren't the same for men and women. For women, cold water or ice water actually invokes a stronger stress response. Stronger than in men.

And this can trigger that sympathetic nervous system, your fight or flight. So instead of reducing cortisol, it sends your brain into overdrive. That stress is not great for your brain or your body.

For women, according to the research, water at like 15 to 16 degrees Celsius seems to be the sweet spot, where you get the same metabolic benefits men get with ice water. And this is important.

There is definitely no research that says a cold plunge needs to be complicated. You don't need some expensive $20,000 copper clothwood tub to do this.

Just running cold water in the shower for a few minutes if you shower in the morning or splashing some cold water on your face might be all it takes. This has been Brain Fact or Fluff. Brain Fact or Brain Fluff.

That's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Dr. Nicole Byers and this is Call Her Brilliant.