S5 Ep4 Rehumanizing Human Performance with Gloria Park

“My guest today is Gloria Park. Gloria is a passionate advocate for rehumanizing human performance optimization by bringing the best of science in sport, performance, and positive psychology to help individuals and organizations thrive.

She applies her expertise to high stakes, high-pressure contexts such as the military, sport, the research, education, and consulting. And I'm just like absolutely, I'm like thrilled to have this conversation with you. I feel like we've crossed paths a number of times at different conferences with HPRT or some of the MCTI work we both do.

And every time I'm like, wow, this is awesome. I want to talk to Gloria more about this. There's so much more to learn.

So thank you for coming on the podcast and teaching all of us about what you're up to. I'm just happy to have you here.

Absolutely. I'm so happy to be here too. Your podcast always stands out in my mind as really informative and I love the depth of the conversations you have.

So it was easy for me to be willing to say yes to come have this chat with you.

And I'll just reiterate, I do not pay my podcast guests to say anything like that or at all. So in any case, Gloria, for folks that haven't had the pleasure of working with you and meeting you, can you give, I know we give a big background in terms of the overview of, but who are you, what do you do, and how do you intersect with this strange world of human performance?

My discovery of human performance really came from my own failures. I was a competitive figure skater at a very young age growing up. I was exceptionally physically talented and I had a lot of great physical capacities.

But looking back on my career, all of the failures and the reasons why I didn't self-actualize, my potential and be as good of an athlete as I could have been, came from my inability to manage my emotions, my struggles with stress and understanding and navigating the social context of figure skating, whether that was with coaches or competitors. And at 16 years old, I had an ankle injury, and that sort of ended my career. And my mom looked at me, and she said, what are you going to do?”

“And I said, I don't know. I guess I'll go to college. So I ended up at Villanova University, right down the street from me, where I currently live.

And my first psychology class, I had this awakening. Like, why anybody talk to me about any of these things throughout the past 10 years? Why did I not know anything about motivation or emotions and how they impact, how we view the world?

And so that was really where my curiosity was peaked with respect to human performance. And I really spent the last, since undergrad, trying to understand as well as train others in some of those capacities or helping people to foster that understanding and knowledge of themselves that I think are, is so essential to success across lots of different domains of life. So that's a little bit of my origin story of how I found my way to performance.

I love it. It's interesting, because right away, we're getting into this concept that we've poked around at a few times, which is that like your ability to, I forget the way you just worded it, but achieve the maximum impact or self-actualize, that's what it was, to self-actualize your potential. But your ability to really operate at the edge of your capacity is so dependent on all of the things that happen before you're in that moment, all of the things that set you up for that.

And this is such an interesting thread, because we're saying a lot of it depends on how well you know yourself as a human being.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think if you fast forward a little bit, now that I got my undergraduate degree in psychology, I did my master's degree in applied positive psychology, which is about like human flourishing.

And then my doctorate was in sport and performance psychology. And throughout like my formal education years, I think we talked about performance optimization through this very discreet moment lens, right? Like when you show up to perform something, these are the things that you need to be thinking about, whether it is managing your physiology or understanding your thoughts and cognitions.

And the more and more that I've been in the field, I'm realizing that without a full conversation about the identities that you bring to the table as a performer, the history, who you are, your families, the social context that you're bringing with you, I think we're missing a big chunk of the conversation around human performance. Back to my origin story, I also think that when I look back, it wasn't just because I didn't have the psychological skills that enabled me to stay gritty and stay composed and be able to execute my performances as a figure skater, but I was also the first-generation child, sorry, the child of first-generation immigrants to the United States from Korea. And I think about the kind of stressors that I felt seeing my family sacrifice so much so that I could cultivate this talent that they viewed that I had.

And those were also things that really weighed heavily on me, that maybe in a moment of performance, like when I was going to get on the ice and do a short program or do a long program, that might not have been top of mind for me, but all of those components combined really had a huge impact on my ability to be the best performer that I could be. So that's a lot of the conversations that “I've been really curious about, especially for almost like a decade or so, is how do we view the whole person, right? And not shift to this reductionist, very simplistic view of what performance is.

Because if you think about people doing really hard things in these really hard settings, there's so much more to the story than what you're in a discreet moment.

Yeah. At the same time, though, that's how, at least for me and I think for a lot of folks, how we get into this human performance sort of idea, right? If we're not lucky enough to have somebody like you on the team helping explain to us, hey, you got to think about all these things before you get out there, what we end up with is, wow, that didn't go the way I wanted it to go.

And why was that? Like, where's the defect between my ears that caused that thing to happen outside of my body? And I remember feeling that way so many times starting in the ER being like, I don't understand why this just happened and where it was.

And so you have this entry point, which is this moment of discrete performance, and then you press on it and you realize, wow, there's actually this whole universe underneath and around that, that I actually really need to understand. And I think as you're telling that story, I'm struck by, I'm sure as you were coming up in figure skating, you had coaches. I'm sure you had systems wrapped around you.

I'm sure you learned how to, okay, we're going to expose my massive ignorance of figure skating here, but I'm sure somebody taught you the different ways to lace your skates and why, and where to shift your balance, and all of the details about that, and all of the history of the sport, and how to, but none of this was there. Or even if it wasn't there in a way that really translated into your brain in a day-to-day moment. And I would tell this the mirror image of that story for me in medicine, right?

You have so much knowledge, and so much capacity, and history, and depth, all these coaches, and trainers, and all these folks who I'm so grateful for to help me along the path. But still so much of the question in my mind was, why did I just fail on this moment? So there's a couple of ways we can take this, and I'm open to whatever direction you want to go for, right?

So one is, why is the system set up that way? Why do we so often separate the teaching of the skill from the teaching of the human and the human performance side of it? And maybe a related or, I don't know if this question has to go first or second, but what is human performance?

How do we conceive of it? How do we do it? How do we conceptualize it?

Is it always attached to a skill? Is it separate from skills? Is it transfer across skills?

And I don't know, I'm sure there's some other questions in there. Oh, what is positive psychology? We should probably touch on that.

I don't know. Do you lose choice? What's compelling to dig into?

“I think what makes sense to me is to talk about why is it that we spend so much time on the technical skill development and less time on the mental performance side. And we may end up switching around the order of it.

Yeah.

But that question is really compelling to me because when I think back to my time as a figure skater, I had jump coaches and spin coaches and choreographers. I had office trainers. I had a body composition test every year.

I had plyometrics training. Every single resource that was available to me, I had a massage once every week at the gym that was attached to my ice rink. Every single resource that was available to me on the physical side, I was provided with and we were willing to pay for as a means to support my physical skill development.

Because I think when you think about sport or even medicine or any of these really highly specialized careers, we often think about the huge amounts of technical knowledge that need to go into a person's capacity to be able to do that thing. Right?

“Totally.

I, and back to the example you gave, I think sometimes, maybe along the way, we don't think about what happens when all of that past amount of knowledge and expertise doesn't end up having the result that we want. We're taught in a very linear way, if you do this, then you do this, then you do this, then this is what happens. But as it is in all of these different domains, there's a high risk for failure, and the consequences associated with failure are high.

Not only for the person who is doing that performance, whatever it is, but also for the context that they're a part of, I'd say different risks per different domains, obviously. But I remember maybe being like nine or ten years old, and I did really well at competitions. I was not used to getting anything less than first.

That was what I was accustomed to. So I remember the first competition that I didn't do well in, and how soul crushing that was. And there was nobody to talk about it with me.

“It was like, yeah, that didn't go the way that you wanted to, but there's always next time. I think that was the bandage or the solution at the time to something that was really soul crushing. And in a lot of ways, again, looking back on it, it was an awakening that I had about my identity.

on't think that, I think now,: 2025

If you look in the military and in sport, there are folks who are working with teams and working with groups who are embedded there to talk about these competencies and to talk about the psychological dimensions of performance. Maybe back then, we hadn't cultivated the acknowledgment of how important it was. Maybe, I know, at least in terms of psychology was always viewed as a resource to be sought out when something was broken.

So there were sports psychologists available to me, but they were mostly clinical in nature. And oftentimes, there weren't clinical issues that I was dealing with. I remember meeting with Juan and starting to have some dialogue around some of my struggles.

I don't think any of my struggles met clinical significance. There were just things that every day people were struggling with that I wanted to have a conversation about. And so I recall the way that those resources were viewed were if something is broken in you, then you seek out this resource, which immediately as a performer and someone who took a lot of pride and being tough and having it all together was something that I was immediately averse to.

Totally. Yeah.

Yeah. And this question segues into what positive psychology is. So after I finished my undergraduate, I knew that I wanted to go into the field of psychology.

I knew that I wanted to, again, take all of the struggles that I'd experienced as a young athlete and help others who were in similar situations by teaching them skills or talking about these skills or providing the space to have those conversations. I did a couple of research assistantships in clinical psychology, and I think I fundamentally didn't resonate with the view of the human condition as like through a clinical lens, right? I saw a lot of my teammates who trained at the rink with me, who went through lots of really difficult things, but they muddled through and were able to do well.

And so for me, the norm seemed, let me back up. I didn't resonate with the view that human beings are weak or flawed in any way. I think what I saw was most people have the capacities within them to overcome adversity and difficulties.

“And I saw that throughout my years as a competitive figure skater and even as a student, that the norm to me felt more like people were resilient if given the chance to figure things out, they would. I think if we had some skills or had some time devoted to cultivating those capabilities and talking about them, that we would flatten that learning curve a lot. But that's where positive psychology comes in.

Positive psychology is more about highlighting what people do well, what are the competencies that people lean on, what does a flourishing life look like, and how do we build those capacities. And so that was a philosophy that I really found resonated more with my view of the human condition than I did one of frailty and fragility.

“Man, there's so much in there. I just have to say this out loud that we're telling stories about you competing at age nine and wrestling with this stuff. Like, at that age, I was like a chubby kid reading Dungeons and Dragons on the couch in Texas, and I didn't have any of the building blocks that you're describing about being in these situations and fighting this on.

I was going to say that out loud for everybody else who's listening to this and is, wait, I didn't hit this when I was nine. Yeah, I get it. But that said, it raises a super interesting question.

Like, when should we be bringing this into people's orbits, right? And let's imagine for a second that we have the code cracked on how to help folks perform at their best, and we're going to ignore for a second whether that's true. We're just going to imagine we have that.

You have a range of people who are attempting ultimately to deploy a skill in a high-stakes environment. Firefighter, astronaut, ER doctor, figure skater, military, whatever it is, right? Like you said, we have all this stuff set up to teach them the technical knowledge.

How do you do the thing itself? Where in that arc in your mind now, looking back, should we be starting to instill some of the other stuff, the human performance stuff that goes around with it? And is it kids?

Is it nine-year-olds? Is it folks at the beginning of their career? I wrestle with this a lot as we think about the pipelines to build some of the operators that we spend our time working with, in part because there's only so much time that we have available to train folks for stuff, and in part because some of these things, it's very hard to explain unless you've lived some version of it.

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe we should talk about what human performance is first. Yeah, just as a lead-in.

To me, human performance used to signal something very different. I think when I first got into this field, again, I initially explored a clinical path, decided that I don't think the pathway to enabling people to perform at their best is just by fixing what's wrong with them. I think that's an important component, and I don't want to undersell that, that there are traumas and things that we encounter in our lives that need to be unpacked, and that is one important component of it.

But I also think that there are opportunities to think about all of the different factors that influence performance at the very human level, and that there are ways to talk about and teach how we can have a little bit more agency over each of those things. So in the military space that I work in, we often talk about human performance through like a total force fitness model, and that includes elements of like physical fitness, nutrition, psychological fitness, social fitness, spiritual fitness, medical and dental, financial fitness. And so there's lots of different components to what are the different things that contribute to a human being's ability to be at their best and put their best foot forward every day.

So that's how I would define human performance. I think when I first started in this field, there was this notion that in order for human beings to be consistent at being excellent, that we had to turn off parts of ourselves that were human. That we had to pull emotions out of that equation.

We had to pull all of the things, all of the variability that makes us human beings out of the equation. Again, back to this very mechanistic and reductionist view. And that was what human performance used to feel like for me when I first got into this field.

And as you mentioned, as I've worked in these settings and watched human beings do their thing, and engaged with people in these various settings, I'm learning that human being is quite the opposite. Human performance is quite the opposite, right? It's about acknowledging those very human components of us.

It's about fostering an understanding of what those things are, fostering a compassion for ourselves, for why those things impact us in these moments that are really important to us, and figuring out how to leverage them, and maybe build in a little bit more intentionality in each of those domains so that we can show up and be at our best. So that's a little bit of the way that my view of human performance optimization has shifted from the past to the present. In the military, sometimes they even talk about things like the “human weapon system”, which to me, honestly, gives me a little bit of the heebie-jeebies.

Like, the weapon system is not the same as human beings. There's lots of differences in that philosophically and from a practical standpoint. And I think that human performance now is very much about acknowledging what makes us humans thinking about what those components are and bringing a little bit more intention and thoughtfulness to how those things impact us in moments that matter the most to us.

Back to the original question of when should we be introducing this. So I was part of a large scale resilience training effort that was rolled out with the Army through the University of Pennsylvania. And a lot of those skills are similar to the kinds of human performance skills that I talk about and I teach in these various contexts.

There are things like understanding that our thinking is biased, right? Figuring out how to quiet mental chatter that might emerge when you're trying to do something that matters to you. Understanding the connections between the things that happened to us, our thoughts, and the behaviors and physiology that we experience as a result of that.

And in that program, the research on the resiliency skills at least were focused on a very specific age group, because we learned through the science, that was the time where people are most open and malleable to learning those skills and applying those skills, and having the cognitive capabilities to understand those components, and then try to figure out how to utilize those strategies in their lives. So I think there are a couple of considerations of when should we be talking about these concepts. I have a 13-year-old boy at home.

And I think kids are really intuitive. I think they experience things that are a mystery to them. So thinking about having a temper tantrum because something doesn't go your way.

I think there are developmental considerations to when you engage in conversations about some of those concepts, where a person has to be of a certain age and certain cognitive capacity to be able to really fully understand what it is that they're experiencing. But I think that process can start a lot sooner than we think because I think kids have the ability to at least start to wrap their minds around certain concepts like emotion regulation, right? Parenting, I think, is the hardest performance.

It's been one of the most challenging things for me personally, despite all of the sort of the book knowledge that I have around these things. Parenting a teenager is exceptionally challenging, and sometimes I'm trying to talk to him about emotion regulation while I'm not doing a very good job of managing my own emotions. But I think that there are lots of opportunities in the lives of just people where you can start to unpack some of these concepts.

My four-year-old took karate during his preschool time. It was like an after school activity. And I remember him coming out on the mat during his first test, and he curled up like a turtle in a ball and refused to move.

And there I am sitting there, I'm like, okay, this is like what I do for a profession, and there's my child curled up in a ball. Again, just an example of an opportunity where you can sit down and talk about what is it that you're experiencing right now. Maybe they don't have the full capacity and the vocabulary to fully understand what that experience is, but to be able to start to have that dialogue, I think, would be vastly valuable.

And I think about, that's for small children and young children, but I think about even folks who are early on in their career, just having the space and being asked the question to even start thinking about, what was that failure like for you? What was that experience like for you? You didn't do as well on that exam as you had hoped.

What are the things that you were thinking about right now? And I think creating that space for people to even open up and start to have that conversation, it doesn't have to be built into the system. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum.

It doesn't have to be something that is so rigid. But if we can start to build some of those practices within the systems that these folks are a part of, I think that would make a big difference. However, I think, if I think about my 13-year-old and the fact that they have a geology elective, and I think about the number of hours that he's at school, and barely any of those are spent on talking about how to understand somebody else's emotions, how to recognize and label your own emotions, right?

How to manage when something doesn't go your way or you feel like you failed at something. That there isn't a emphasis within the structure is also upsetting to me. That I think we could be doing a better job of thinking about what are the essential components of what makes for success, and how do we build in structured time to learn some of these capabilities that I think will really help people self-actualize and be able to reach their full capacity with whatever it is that they're seeking out trying to do.

Thank you for just digging into that. I think that's incredibly important. And I had a chance the other day to do the second to last lecture for a group of graduating medical students, right?

And so previously we didn't really have anything in place when we sent folks from residency training to being a doctor, other than a good luck and a stiff tight on the back and try not to blow yourself up as you do it. And at least now a lot of places are having these transition to residency programs put in. So we're taking this transition, this jump point, and layering some structure and some systems around it.

And often it's done in some sense like that total force fitness model that you're describing. So it's, here's what you need to understand about finances as you move to this next level. Here's what you need to understand about the insurance and all sorts of stuff, which is all wonderful because whatever else we're about to say about human performance, like that's all true.

You have to eat, you have to sleep, you have to like your teeth use a dental and they're somewhere, your teeth have to be healthy, healthy in order to do that. You have to take care of this stuff that you have to take care of, and that's super important. And one of the sessions I ran with them was a session built around the concept of the Yerkes-Dodson curve, this bell-shaped relationship between human performance and actually technically rat performance when they designed it, but human performance and stress and arousal.

And the whole session boils down to doing essentially what you're describing, right? We put ourselves mentally in situations where we are on one part of the curve. We look inside and say, what does it feel like when we're over here?

“We identify those signals and then we develop experiments for how to move ourselves back and forth on different parts of the curve and manage our stress and arousal. I love doing it. I do that with incoming ER doctors, I do with graduating medical students.

What I'm consistently pretty shocked by is that all of them, this is the end of their, so they've done four years college, all the high school, four years medical school. They had heard about the Yerkes-Dodson curve the day before I came in and talked to them. And it's because somebody else that had been in one of my talks was like, “you guys are going to hear from Dan about this Yerkes-Dodson curve thing.”

And like that, what's that phrase, right? The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago, the second best time is right now. And that's what we're talking about for this, right?

If we can layer some of these scope of practice in, right? If we can build this into alongside of anatomy and physiology or whatever else we're doing, that here's anatomy, by the way, what does it feel like to go dissect a cadaver? Have you thought like, we get some version of, are you okay?

You're okay? Good. Good.

Thumbs up. Good. All right.

Back to work. Not like an actual sort of in-depth like process of, hey, this is an opportunity to understand yourself, which will you will then need when you become a surgeon or a pediatrician or whatever. And I think that one of the reasons we don't do that is because frankly, a lot of us aren't that good, right?

We have the, what we sometimes call in medicine, the TIM solution to it. How do you guys run the cardiac arrest team over here? Oh, we do it the TIM way.

Who's TIM.? T.I.M.'s the guy that worked here 10 years ago, that invented some way to do it at this shop, and we just kept doing it that way because TIM trained that guy and that guy trained this woman, and that woman does it, and so we just call it the TIM method. And it's just whatever you had, whatever you were exposed to, that you figured out for yourself to bumble your way through it.

And it's challenging because in a lot of ways, like you don't see the gap between where you are and where you could be a lot of the time. Like sometimes you see the gap between where you think you should be and what happened, right? Like a failure is pretty obvious.

But that other part, the missing ability where you could be performing is invisible. And if you've gone through and develop your own systems for it, it's super tempting to be like, I've made it so everybody else should figure it out too. As opposed to saying, what could we be doing?

What is the sum potential of what we could be achieving if we were able to layer in some of these skills? I guess I'm super curious about how could we be building this in earlier like we're describing. But then also if we just take where we are now, we just cross-section through that.

If I'm on shift and I'm a leader, and I'm listening to this podcast, and I'm super charged up, what do I go ask my teammates? How do I start these conversations locally with where I am, even if I can't go back in time and instill it 10 years ago?

Yeah. Yeah, I think, I'm trying to think of which question to answer first. For me, in the spaces that I'm occupying in right now, I feel like youth sport is a really excellent place to start having these conversations.

It's not within the school structure. There's no set curricula. Youth sport is a huge industry, and there's so many kids who go through and they start playing when they're three years old all the way through.

So I view any situation, it could be music, education, it could be drama, it could be these things that are built into the everyday lives of young people, where we could really leverage opportunities to talk about these important concepts early on, and that's something that we can come back to in the conversation, but that's something that I've been really passionate about, that we shouldn't be waiting for people to be in the elite ranks, to start having these conversations and providing resources, that there's so many, if we just take a moment and look and think about where can we inject little bits of these conversations, I think there's lots of opportunities to do that. To the other question that you posed, I think that, and you and I have talked about this, I think maybe at a previous MCTI event, we do a really good job as human beings of unpacking failures, of creating space to look at errors or missteps or things that didn't go right, and pulling up a chair and creating the time to sit down and say, what happened here? Let's talk about what happened.

What is the impact of that error or that mistake or the thing that went wrong? How do we prevent it from happening again? And I think that we can turn a little bit of that logic on its head and think about doing some future forecasting, right?

And this is a lot of drawing on the intersections between positive psychology, sport and performance psychology. Some of this is positive imagery. Other bits of this is taking the time to sit down with people and say, what is the best way that this can go, right?

Let's sit down, pull up a chair, unpack, what does success look like in its best form here? What is that going to do in terms of its impact on the problem that we're trying to solve? What do each of you need to bring to the table?

If it's a team or an individual, what do you need to bring to the table in terms of the beliefs and the thoughts that you're thinking in that moment, the physiology that you need to be carrying with you in that moment, to enable this thing to occur? Really sitting down and unpacking that and having people think about that gives them something to build in terms of an approach, right, to creating that best performance. And I think we're really bad at doing that.

I think we think of that as a luxury. We think of that as, sure, if we had some extra time, that would be something that would be a great thinking exercise. Whereas we would never say that about unpacking a mistake or an error or something that has gone wrong, that this is something that's critical to doing our best.

I think some of it is, some of the questions that I think in moments that we can ask are focused on creating images or visions of what right looks like that people can strive towards, rather than unpacking mistakes or what wrong looks like that people can try to avoid. Does that make sense?

No, absolutely. We talk all the time about how a lot of what we measure in medicine is the lack of bad things. What does success look like?

Oh, you didn't have any catheter-associated UTIs. Oh, you didn't have any infections in this kind of a central line, like gold star, literally sometimes gold star, right? Which is awesome, but that's just not really there.

And borrowing heavily from positive psychology, I think it's from Seligman himself who talked about the idea of the rosebush kind of thing. If you want to grow a rosebush, it's not enough to clear the weeds out, then you just have a patch of land. You have to actually put a seed in and water it.

I love that metaphor so much. And that concept of what are you aiming at, that excellence, even in crisis, even in emergency, excellence is not just the lack of bad things. It's much more than.

It's the positive creation of something. So we ran an exercise, a team we worked with recently, and we were talking about how when you come home from work, how do you answer the how was your day question? And we set this up to be like, how do you buffer the really hard days, which is an incredibly important challenge.

What I wasn't expecting quite as much was how much of a challenge everybody had with answering that question when they had a day that they were proud of, when their team performed at an incredibly high level and stuff got done that was borderline heroic, and at the very least, just absolutely epic. And they all had a hard time. Almost nobody was able to name something they did to tell their partner or their family or whatever about that, because they were just like, it's okay, there's 10 other days that are bad, or it's not that big a deal, I'm not that important, it's not that big a thing.

And that's especially hard to handle that concept of excellence when you layer into it, that for a lot of us, our excellence happens only when somebody else is suffering massively. Right? Like the highest technical capacity, emergency care, only happens when somebody needs that care to happen.

And as other than SIM or some other things that would boil in there. But a lot of the times you're facing this very complex set of things that happens to it, and it's really easy to not ever spend time thinking about excellence, or spend time thinking about... Like, maybe you spend time thinking about what looks like when you're talking about a very narrow bubble of a skill set.

Like, you did this thing very well. Okay, we can take that. But you're aiming for excellence is such a harder sort of conversation to have in there.

Yeah, and I'm curious from the folks that you work with, Dan, like, what gets in the way of that? What makes that so hard?

I think it's the thing that I've been poking at a little bit, and this is called this Medicine Discovery Rounds, where you're going around the problem set, and you're all talking about it together, and you're figuring it out as you go, because I'm not going to pretend I know the answer to this. But here's the way I'm thinking about it, right? One of the big links in here is essentially storytelling.

What is the story that we're telling ourselves about who we are, about what our job is, and about why things happen? And so, if you're telling yourself the story that everything should be perfect all the time, and if anything isn't perfect, you're a failure, which is a story that's very common in a lot of the fields that we work with. It's not particularly one, if I asked you to vote, that you'd probably want your brothers, sisters, or kids to be telling themselves, but it's one that we all typically tell ourselves.

If that's the story that you're telling, then you did a good job in that story arc, why would you celebrate that? In that story arc, that's just table stakes. “Yeah, you showed up and did your job, and you want a gold star for doing your job?”

“Go back to work. There's other people suffering.” And there's not really a space in there to create the ability to celebrate good things when they happen, to celebrate innovation, to celebrate excellent teamwork.

And so sometimes you see systems that invent awards for folks like that, successes or saves, or there's a wonderful one on the nursing side, the Daisy Award, right, that goes to like people that are like just true champions of human caring in a lot of ways. But I don't know the answer to your question, but I think that somewhere in there, the link is how do we conceive of the world around us, and what do we allow ourselves the space to get into?

Yeah, and I think I would totally agree with that, that sometimes the bar is so high that it's hard to find reasons to celebrate. In my experience, I think folks who are high performers have this idea that if I ever take five minutes to celebrate, then that's time lost on something else that I could be accomplishing, right? Or something else that I could be thinking about that's ultimately going to be, make me better tomorrow.

And oftentimes, the prioritization of thinking about failures is placed much higher than celebrating successes. Some of that is just negativity bias, right?

Sure.

We just have a natural tendency to think about the things that went wrong. But I think in high performance settings, people really hold on to this idea that if I take a minute and celebrate, I'm going to lose my edge. You're going to lose that edge that I need to be able to push harder tomorrow and be better tomorrow and to make improvements that will push me to be even a better performer tomorrow.

And that's something that is just like this overarching philosophy that I'm often fighting against in the work that I'm doing is back to the Rose Garden metaphor, right? You have to take time to cultivate the things that are in that dirt. You have to take time to celebrate it, savor it, think about it, unpack it in the same way that you do with the weeds that you're pulling out.

Otherwise, there isn't that future vision to work towards.

Imagine you're growing a garden and you have a dashboard, and every day the dashboard tells you what percent of the garden has weeds in it. And that's the only metric you get. You never see the part where you grew this beautiful flower, or you have this incredibly healthy vegetable that's going to go feed your community.

I'm really stretching this metaphor here. But all you get is the percent of weeds that are there. So that accurately reflects what a lot of the dashboards are that we see, right?

So you see time to patient being seen, or you see how many patients are waiting more than X hours, or what percent of hospital beds are closed, or you see this constant stream of just like stuff that's wrong. And occasionally in some systems, like stroke systems, for example, you might get feedback on a particularly effective case. Hey, this is a great save.

We did this great thing. This person has great outcome, and that's amazing, and that's wonderful. But most of the time, what you're seeing is just this constant stream of problems and things that are horrible in your face all the time.

And it's easy to adopt that as like your vision of reality, and to not pause and think about this. I started doing, when I take over from somebody on a shift, and I don't work that many shifts these days, but when I'm taking over for a shift, I'll get sign out, I'll hear about all the patients, I'll ask if anybody's particularly sick, who needs my attention right away, and then the outgoing attending, I will try to ask them in front of the whole team, what did you learn or get better at today? What surprised you?

And I want to have an opportunity for them before they go home to say something about, I tried this or I didn't know about this and I learned about it, and just to have some little leverage point to go off of for it. But I'm super curious if you have advice around that. Maybe we can't change the whole system and the dashboards and the metrics that we're looking at, because we don't have that level of control over the system.

We obviously can, as much as possible, go back and work with folks who are younger in the pipeline and ping them and ask them these questions. But if I'm a trauma nurse listening to this in some hospital in Kentucky, what do I do on my shift about this?

Yeah.

Just easy questions.

I think the point of what we measure ends up being what we value is a really important one. And I see that, especially with some of the work that we do in the military, that it's harder to quantify what is going well and what is right when the culture of performance that you exist around measures that through things that are wrong, right? I think about like error rates and things like that.

We've worked with different operational communities in trying to quantify what does good performance look like, and it's the absence of errors, right? That is something that I think needs to change, but it's really hard to change. And even in the prevention space, right?

It's much harder to say that we prevented something from happening than measuring and counting the things that we fixed that already happened, right? So I just wanted to echo that and say that's something that we see a lot in the military, especially that we don't have good measures or dashboards that are representing the things that have happened. So that's certainly a challenge.

Back to, what can we do at the individual level, at the organizational level?

Yeah, I'll take anything you got, right? I think we need this. Is tactical optimism a word?

Is that a thing, or are we going to make that up right here? Yeah.

All right, great.

Tactical optimism. I think there's some need to nudge that. And most of us on Shift can't change the dashboards we're given.

We can't change the fact. And also you have to fix those things, right? You have to actually not have errors.

That's super important. And also if we want to create a culture, because just to arc this all back, we're saying out loud that to perform consistently at our best and to be able to push the line of what best looks like, requires looking at that line, figuring out what optimal is, building the systems around us that support that, having the conversations early and often about what performance looks like, and what goes into it, and what are we doing, and zooming out from that exact moment of performance into the broader universe of what enables that moment to exist. And if that's the universe we're aiming at, then what are the small things we can do to start that ball rolling?

Maybe that's a good way to do that question. Yeah.

I think there's lots of different ways to think about it. I think we often think about individuals, right? And how to give individual people skills.

So whether those are leaders in these contexts, or those who are training the incoming generation of performers in a particular context, we think of giving individuals the skills to ask good questions, or to hold good debriefs that do a nice job of balancing what went wrong, how did you fix it, what went wrong, and how did you make that happen. So those are more like individual person skills. And I think that for a long time, we thought that was the solution, right?

And I think that's part of the solution. I think there are lots of different capabilities and skills that individuals can learn that can not only have a positive impact on their own performance, but can have a ripple effect on the groups and the teams and the communities that they work within, right? And this was really some of the foundational philosophy around some of the resiliency work that we've done, as well as some of the human performance optimizations or education efforts is this idea that if you teach an individual that they will nourish and enrich the environment around them.

More and more, I'm coming to understand that giving individual skills when they're part of a system that is broken, and that doesn't provide, back to the gardening metaphor, the fertile soil for anything to grow is problematic. It not only burdens the individual, in addition to the many other burdens that individual is carrying with them in those contexts, that it makes them feel like they should have more of an impact, but try as I might, I'm not having the impact that I want to have. And that can be really frustrating.

And I see this not only on the psychological health side, but even in some of the projects we've done, where we're talking to people about performance nutrition, right? How to fuel yourself for the best performance. And they're saying, do you have two hours that you can give me that I can get myself to the nearest facility to properly fuel myself and come back?

So to me, I think more and more human performance optimization has to move in the direction of understanding both components, right? What can we do to empower, enable, educate individuals to have more agency in their own performance and the impact that they have on the teams and the groups that they're a part of? But how do we also create the systems and the structures and the context and the environment that support those efforts?

Because without, if you have one without the other, there's, it's all money down the drain in my, yeah. And it's frustrating, it is ineffective. And I think that's been hugely problematic in the human performance optimization world as a whole, that we're not matching different levels of intervention and thinking about what kind of context people are part of, and how do we change things so that they can have more autonomy and feel empowered to make those changes.

So sleep is a good example in the military, right? There's a lot of sleep education and fatigue management efforts going on across the military, where we're always talking to people about getting regular sleep and the importance of that with respect to performance. But when you talk to folks about what actually impedes sleep, it's a slew of other things that they don't have control over.

Sure. I don't have control over the swing shift. I don't have control over the fact that I'm dual military, and I don't have anybody to watch my kid.

And it's all of these other things that are factoring into the vision. Right? So the simple things that we view that are within somebody's control, if you put that person in a context where they don't have any of that autonomy or control, it can be hugely frustrating.

So that's not a simple answer. I know I didn't give the one thing that I... Yeah, but I think...

Yeah, sorry.

No, I'm just... I'm laughing as I'm remembering some consultant that was brought in to talk to us at one point or another about stress management and recommended that if you're really having a hard time, you should take a step out and look at the sun and take a walk. And I was like, “do you understand what we do in the ER?”

Like, our patients would die. Now, that's not always true, but that is actually a lot of the time true. And like, you can't, you have to build, if you create solutions that don't work in the context, as you're describing, then you're not only wasting time and energy, but you're creating this resistance to it.

Whereas people are like, this is garbage, and so most of this other stuff is probably garbage, too, which is not true. There's actually some great stuff in there, but you have to like pick and choose your way through it.

Yeah, I think that's where like the art and the science of performance intersect, right? It's that there is some good science out there on how all of these different lovers can be adjusted to enable human performance. And again, this is like back to the reductionist view of what works, and maybe it works for certain populations in certain settings without that translational piece and an understanding of the culture, the beliefs and the history that career field carries with them without unpacking some of that.

I think that we're failing to translate that science effectively in a way that can really make a difference in these settings.

Gloria, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and digging into this with everybody and teaching me about these ideas and everything. There's just, there's so much in here, and I think we're barely scratching the surface of a lot of what needs to be for this conversation. So, as we wind this down, I'm going to give you a chance to issue a challenge to folks listening to this.

Anything that you want them to do or try or think about or dig into. And I'm going to stall for you while you're thinking about it by doing our disclaimer, which is that our job here is to bring together the best of what people and teams have figured out about performance under pressure. We don't provide medical advice and nothing.

Oh, and both of us are here of our own volition representing only ourselves. Nothing that we say is the opinion of any of the folks or teams that employ us or that we work with. I'll also add to this that one thing that I'm personally going to try is this idea of what's the best way this could go, asking that question, and then your follow-up question of what do you have to believe or bring to the table in order to make that outcome much more likely?

I think that's a really wonderful way to ask that, that I'm excited to try and see what happens. Great.

Yeah, I think the challenge that I would issue, and maybe this goes back to me occupying this interesting space between positive psychology, which is about human flourishing and thriving, and performance psychology, which is about being excellent and putting our best foot forward every day. I think the challenge that I would issue for everybody is to think about what are the things? Maybe there are some components of the total force fitness model that we talked about that enable you to show up and be at your best, and those things are really important, right?

How do I fuel myself? How do I meet my basic physical health needs of getting sleep and resting and recovering? Maybe those are really basic questions, but oftentimes questions that don't get asked at the cost of wanting to show up and be at my very best every day.

The challenge I would issue to everybody listening to this podcast would be to also think about what can I do differently to pursue the things that matter most to me, while still supporting, thriving in my sense of well-being? And I think this comes back to this idea of seeking out ways to better understand our humanity, within the context of human performance optimization, that we are not human doings, we are human beings. We're social by nature.

The connections that we have matter greatly to our sense of safety and calm and peace and happiness. And I think that oftentimes people in high performance settings believe that they have to strive for excellence at the cost of everything else that brings them joy. And maybe the question you could be thinking about is what can I do differently?

Maybe it's a little thing or a big thing that not only enables me to put my best foot forward every day, but also helps me to cultivate a sense of mattering and a sense of self-worth, and a sense of self-worth beyond just the thing that you do every day. Because I think that oftentimes, the folks that I encounter in these various settings, in high-performance settings, forget that they are much more than the thing that they do. Sure.

Yeah.

So, that is the question that's top of mind, and I hope that people will reflect on that. There's a lot of ways that you can continue pursuing the thing that is important to you, but also do that in a way that supports other aspects of your humanity and your well-being.

Love it. Gloria, thank you so much. Thank you for coming to the podcast.

Thank you for having me, Dan.