SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello and

Intro

SPEAKER_00 0:06

welcome back to the Slice of Pie podcast, where the pie is the psychologically informed environment, and the mission is to try and further our understanding of what that might look like in sport, in business, or in any environment where performance and well-being are hot topics. It's the second episode of 2024, and it's with Dr. Martin Turner, reader in psychology at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Martin is a very experienced academic, researcher, and practitioner with specific interests in challenge and threat studies and athletes and the use of OBT within sport and other performance areas. On the applied side, Martin has worked across football, cricket, rugby, cycling, archery, shooting and equestrian. He also provides performance psychology to business professionals and is the lead sports psychologist for England futsal. His work with athletes has included seasons at Nottingham Forest FC Academy, Nottingham County Cricket Club Academy, Staffordshire County Cricket Club Academy, and Stoke City Football Academy. And if you've been a regular attendee at sports psychology conferences in the last 10 years, you've probably also seen Martin speak or deliver workshops. I've always enjoyed his deep knowledge and engaging delivery, and it was delightful to be able to interview him about a recent paper on the topic of ROBT with sales professionals. So we start talking about that paper, but we then sidestep into wider ROBT principles and tenets. So I think this would be a great inverted commas starter for 10 episode for anyone interested in ROBT in sport and also its basic principles. So we'll dive into the conversation and then come back up for air for a reflection in about 29 minutes time. So let's get into the conversation with Dr. Martin Turner.

The interview

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Martin, good to have you on. How are you? Yeah, good thanks, Pete. Thanks for the invitation. Always good to talk to you. I am mixing up the format. You're the first person to experience this. And this has been influenced actually by a fantasy NFL podcast that I listened to where the host, Heath, actually asks his guests to promote what they're doing at the start. Because actually, people, a lot of people actually kind of log off podcasts by the end. So you just want to make sure that everyone knows where you are online and what you're doing. So yeah, feel free to tell the listeners of Slice of Pie what you're up to at the moment, anything you want to promote in terms of recent papers or books and where people can find you online. Yeah, sure. So Twitter is uh Dr.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

MJ Turner. Um, it's mostly focused around uh REBT-based content. So, you know, that you know, I'm kind of yeah, I deliver on that promise, but nothing else. Um the book came out, I think it was like December 2022, which is a a pretty a pretty hefty guide to using RBT. It's really I would say four practitioners, coaches, sports psychologists, um, psychotherapists, in terms of how how we use RBT um within performance settings. I've got it in front of me. There you go. There's a nice dragon on the front. There's a good dragon. There's lots of pictures throughout there for people who aren't interested in the words. You can just look at the pictures or whatever. Um, and then another book came out kind of in the summer of 2023, which is around academics, practitioners writing about different CBTs and how they might be used in practice. So a couple of projects that people might be interested in uh in um in accessing there.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Good stuff. Thank you very much, and probably a good segue, because this interview, this episode is going to focus on REBT and in particular a paper that I saw circulated, I think, by yourself on Twitter a few weeks ago, which I thought was really interesting, focuses on REBT in a sales setting. But I'm sure you're very used to doing this, so I'm going to put you on the slot. So for our listeners, what would be a kind of good potted recap of REBT in terms of what it is and the kind of key tenets, the key pillars that sit behind it?

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Yeah, sure. So RBT belongs to a family of psychotherapies, really, that we know to be cognitive behavioral therapies. Uh, it's quite a broad, a broad family. It captures many different approaches. REBT is a quite specific approach in that it's it's kind of uh the the word rational within RBT kind of gives it away. It's really focused on rationality. How do we help people to adopt rational ideas, philosophies, thoughts um about themselves, other people in the world? And in doing so, how do we sort of facilitate them in adapting to adversity? You know, we all face adverse situations, you know, life is stressful. And when we face those stresses, we experience emotions. Sometimes those emotions help us, sometimes they don't. RBT's central idea is that when those emotions don't help us, it's partly because of the things we tell ourselves about the adversity. It's these narratives that we have in our heads that might drive us to experience dysfunctional or functional emotions. You you're trying to hopefully through RBT not necessarily have to remove adversity from people's lives because that's not really possible. And um it's very exhausted, you know, if you want to sort of approach your life getting rid of every stress and every adversity, that's not gonna really work out. I don't think that's really that's really possible. So RBT kind of encourages people to to still approach those adversities and and accept and understand that sometimes things are going to be tough, but there's no no reason necessarily to make that worse by what you say to yourself and the things you believe. Um and this has been appealing within you know sports situations, in in business, in military, in health settings, because those settings um are partly defined by their adversity, they are you know stressful situations, stressful contexts. So RBT has has been appealing to people working within those settings because of that.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Tell you what, that's a pretty good potted summary. You can tell you are very experienced in giving that answer.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

Well, there's no need to buy the book there, is there? Because I've sort of books worth of explanation.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

Well, you still need to know about the you know the contextual elements to when, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

You need you need the references as well. You see, you need the references.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

You need the references, you need the you need the pictures. You need the the dragon pictures. That's a good point, yeah. Good stuff. So I think that's really, really helpful background context then for the the paper we're going to discuss. So this was the application of an REBT intervention for 56 sales professionals in the Northwest. So a pre-test, post-test methodology, half were put into an ROBT experimental group, armed with the ability to do some of the things that you've just described and be useful to, I think, understand that uh a bit later. And what you found is group that were kind of exposed to this ROBT skills saw a reduction in irrational beliefs and emotional reactivity. How was that? Decent summary. Is there anything else from a helicopter view of the paper that I've missed there and you'd want to add into that summary?

SPEAKER_01 8:02

I don't think so. You know, these these things always you try to design things that are going to work scientifically, but also you have to go into these things, understanding that you're working with actual people in the real world, you're not bringing them into a laboratory. So a lot of the applied work that we do and and and publish and write about, um, you try to do as scientifically as you can. But you're in the real world, you're trying to try to understand how you can recruit people, um, what are the benefits for them going in? You have to be careful what you tell them. So this is a relatively scientific piece of work, but it still has that applied edge, really, and it has things in there that I think practitioners can can replicate and actually utilize, which is always, I think, should be a core aim of writing something applied, you know.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

You want to add to the literature base and to make that literature base useful over time for practitioners. There needs to be as high a quality methodology as possible in order to kind of drive the standards up for the source material that we're using as practitioners, but at the same time, to have good ecological application. You ideally you want to be doing this in the real world, and the real world isn't as as helpful sometimes to science in terms of wanting to button down all those variables and factors. Yeah, um that's how I understand what you've just said, Martin. Maybe I've just said what exactly what you've just said in different words.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

No, you can edit mine out, you can you can edit me out and just I could just do that for the whole thing. The whole thing, yeah, the whole thing.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Just speak to myself, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Sort of like a hypothetical conversation with uh Martin Turner. Yeah, I think the other thing to add with this is that so we have uh a group that undertakes RBT. Now, this is at a group level, this is at an educational level, they're getting the 20 minutes a week for four weeks. So this is a relatively brief intervention from a you know from a standpoint of psychological interventions per se. This would be considered to be quite brief. But in the control group that got nothing, but we still monitor them in the same way, we see that their emotional reactivity actually gets worse and significantly so. So partly this is about okay, well, how do we help people with RBT to say, for example, in this paper to reduce emotional reactivity? In this case, it reduced the persistence of their emotional episodes. Yeah, okay, we want to do that. But the other group get worse. So it's it's kind of timely in that sense. If you just leave things, then they're not going to get better by themselves. Yeah. If we leave groups within these stressful situations, these stressful contexts to just manage, then things might not work out. Um, so it's a case of sometimes going, okay, well, how how much did we help people? Well, certainly more than the ones that we didn't work with. So there's so there's that. Um, but it's always tricky to contextualize this within the actual workplace. What does this mean? You know, they're less irrational, uh, they have less emotional persistence. Um and maybe we can get into that, but it's like, how does it affect my work? How does it affect my well-being? Those are the parts where you we try to get into a bit and say, well, okay, what's the practical significance um significance of this away from the stats, away from the P below 0.05? Yeah. What was it actually doing with uh to people? You know, I think that's important.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Talking about the kind of the practical application of it, you obviously mentioned there they were getting 20 minutes a week for four weeks. What does that 20 minutes a week for four weeks look like? Is it like a kind of a mini kind of therapeutic practitioner-client relationship 20 minutes? Is it more educational and painting the the types of strategies they they could be using in response to perceived adversity and the reactions to that? How how does that look? It's mostly educational.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

Yeah. So you imagine you have a group, you're working with a group of people, group of sales professionals, and um, you know, they join um a Zoom meeting. You you've got you've got some slides prepared to deliver certain key aspects of REBT. Now there is opportunities there for discussion, but with when doing research, this is where it maybe doesn't translate into the world that well sometimes. You want to make sure that participants are kept as anonymous and confidential as they can be. So that actually limits the ability for people to put their cameras on and have a chat. Uh-huh. So for intents and purposes, it was, you know, delivered as an educational piece of work. Between each of those sessions, participants were asked to complete some homework. So you know, homework, you know, it's not necessarily the word you would use to the participants. You might say independent activity or something, you know. But yeah in RBT we call it homework. And that that that would be reflect on your own beliefs. Uh, it could be have a go at challenging your own beliefs, it could be um have a go at this this particular activity, this kind of practical task. And then when you come back in the following week, there's some time there to reflect. And if people want to, they can discuss it, they can type in the chat box if they want to uh remain anonymous. So it's uh it's not as interactive as you would probably like, and not as interactive as probably would drive greater effect, I think. But it's you know, it's essentially quite a structured and quite proceduralized um education program.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Great. I mean, it I think useful to go to that detail here to to help the listeners understand what what that looks like in terms of an intervention for a study. So thank thank you for that. Just stepping back a sec to look at the the cohort in this study and actually the the area of business that we're talking about in sales, it really struck me reading the paper, the applicability of this very results-driven setting to REBT. And it's interesting how how many times I've seen either and I've done it myself, podcasts on what can business learn from sports psychology. And and just like sport is such a huge suitcase of different environments with with different contexts and and different actors, the same is is for business as well. And I'm sure different parts of business can learn different things. And but this specific part of business in terms of sales, the way that the paper's kind of painted, and the way I suppose my own biased and anecdotal experiences with people that work in sales settings, it does seem a lot closer to sport than maybe other areas of of business in terms of imitating that very performance-driven conditions. Is is is that something you found? Is there are there any wrinkles to that? It'd be, I think, interesting to get your reflection on that.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

That the pressures of sport, the idea that you you have this this target to reach, that it's outcome driven. I think that people often assume that that's that's special to sport, but it's not special to sport. I mean, academics listening at the moment will will understand that there are there are parts of our job where there are some external markers. There are some external markers of esteem. There are some external targets that we're we're encouraged to hit. One of the differences that we found in sales people and and working within business myself over the years as a consultant. It's kind of seen as do or die. Like here's the target. And if you don't hit it, there'll be repercussions. And you might not be able to live with the repercussions because that might be no job for you next week. Or that might mean not as much, you know, not as much money for you if you're working on a commission basis, for example. So that's what makes sales particularly interesting, and that's where it might diverge. Not to say that you don't have similar types of things in sport, because certainly there are consequences for not making the grade. Yeah. But there seems to me within sales, within those professional settings, less of a focus on development, you know, less less of focus on well, it's about getting better and doing better and staying on track and deal dealing with adversity. It's about okay, whatever, that's fine. But how much have you sold? You know, all that stuff is he's almost seems to me to be given lip service when I think in sport, or maybe I'm just fortunate to have been in those sporting contexts as a practitioner. There is there is still a drive for development. Yeah, there is a passion for for doing better and getting better. And yes, we are focused on the results, and we shouldn't be embarrassed about that necessarily. We are trying to compete to win stuff, okay, fine. But there is also this other side, which I'm not familiar with and haven't really seen in the more in the kind of sales type professional settings.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

I don't know if that's don't know if that fits with your experiences, too, Pete. Yeah, I think it does, and I think it it will definitely differ by organization and and and how the contracts work and and your expectations going into two jobs, etc. But there's there's something there that I'd love to pick up, uh pick up on because it is in the discussion guide, which is around what you're putting on a pedestal. And you know, by by having this kind of do-or-die relationship with the outcome, which is what's been brought in, it does very much create the conditions for a hugely outcome-focused environment. And if you compare that to athletes that are getting better and better in terms of being drilled from a young age or being exposed to sports psychology, you see it on TV interviews now all the time. They're they're chat in front of the microphone on match of the day or or Sky Sports, and they say things like, All we can do is focus on the process. And that seems to be such a kind of an overriding rhetoric that I think is a really good thing that you're you're seeing when athletes are put in front of the camera because that there's such a high amount of control on things like turning up for training and and and putting your best foot forward and putting in your best effort and trying to execute on your your training plans in order to affect the outcome goals of of winning or to affect the performance goals of how you perform, which then affect the outcome goals. Whereas if there seems to be a shortcut here, which is it's just actually the sale. And like you said, around kind of lack of focus on development, there isn't maybe a kind of an onus on or a kind of a thought process around actually the thing that I really can affect is is the process, the thing that maybe I can only partially affect is the is the onus here, which is the outcome.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

And that's where it gets tricky, I think, in in these settings where individuals are valued only for what they make. Uh we have that we have that conflation, which is quite a uh, you know, RBT gives us warning signs about that way of thinking. You are not what you do. You know, the only true statement is you are a human being. You know, you might say I'm an athlete. Well, no, it's one of the things that you do. The only thing that you are is a human being, you know, and uh one of the issues that we face within sports, but also in in setting where we do have such a it is driven so much by this icon, is the individual is treated as if they're only valued for what they can for what they can make, what they can achieve. So and then the individual can internalize that and uh and say, Well, I'm only valuable when I'm succeeding. Well, the problem is that is the reverse also becomes true. Then when I don't succeed, I'm worthless, I'm useless, uh, and I'm a failure.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Yeah, so it became it becomes a a kind of a travelator. Absolutely, yeah. Don't know whether I've got the new series of of gladiators in my mind. It's like the it's it's like the travelator, you have to stay on it.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

But also, one of the things RBT helps us to understand is that these things aren't true. That that if you say I've not sold as much as I should have, so I I'm a complete failure. Well, you can say it, but just because you can say something and think something doesn't mean say it's based in any logical fact. So RBT tries to encourage you to base what you think and believe on on evidence and on logic. So these kinds of thoughts and beliefs that I've done well, so I'm a complete success, I've done badly, I'm a complete failure. They don't they're not really not really accepted necessarily in RBT. Encourage people to challenge that that way of thinking because that's that it's it's a non-sequitary in some ways. Being successful doesn't mean you're a complete success. You know, you could be the most successful salesperson in the world, you will still have failed at times. You know, so it's it's it's trying to help people to be less totalistic, less extreme, less dogmatic in their thoughts and beliefs, which I think fits well in into this um environment.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

The use of the word failure from from the very excellent workshops that I've participated in over the years, where um yourself and and other practitioners have educated us on the tenets of of REBT, that word does come up a lot, it comes up a lot in CBT courses that I've been on. And you know, in this particular environment, that word is integrated into the fabric of the culture, the fact that targets are either achieved or you fail to make your your targets. And and that that word is maybe not used with the intention of being so emotional because it's kind of almost a culturally accepted term. Like a failed target, I don't think people would necessarily. Associate that with being like a super bad phrase because it's so familiar to people. But actually, when you think that that that word then plays almost like this, you know, it becomes part of the fabric of the environment, people might not necessarily realize how unhelpful that is, versus you know, using different language like targets that are not achieved, uh, for example.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

See what you mean. So one of the interesting things for me is is um when I'm trying to work with people on this stuff, I suppose, is it's really important to call a spade a spade. Now you can you can say I failed without having to then say and therefore I'm a failure. Yeah. So I I can I I can I can support your conclusion that you failed. There's no need to steer clear of that particular language. Now, what I won't encourage you to do, and will discourage you to do, in fact, will be to then take it one step further, let it just slide. You then say, and I am a complete failure, or that I failed and therefore it's terrible, or I can't tolerate it, I can't stand it. You get that language of you know, we're not we don't tolerate failure. Well, you do, you do naturally because when you fail, you don't die. Most people, you know, there are some jobs where you know that's not the case. But um so you are tolerating it, but being intolerant of failure doesn't really mean anything. It's it's things like that that we start to move into, where we start to move into an absence of logic, an absence of rationality that we start to challenge. Now, for me to to go in somewhere and say it's not failure, it's growth, you know, it's not failure, it's feedback. Fine. Call it what you want, but we both know you failed. We both know that there was a target there and you didn't hit it. I don't know what what other word there is to describe that. So in RBT, you would say, well, okay, let's describe it as I'll describe it how you want to describe it. If you tell me you failed, then great, I'm I'm I'm on the boat with you. If you then tell me and therefore I'm useless, then I'm not in the boat with you anymore. Because you step you've you've crossed a line into irrationality that I that I can't support. And it would be it wouldn't be fair to me to encourage you to adopt that kind of belief, knowing where it potentially leads to.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Very, very interesting. And I can imagine as well in the first part of that, not disputing the language that people want to bring to those situations is also pretty good for kind of client buy-in because you're not fighting them on the words that they want to use. You say that's fine, you can use that word, and I'm in the boat with you there. It's that next bit is where you can then, if you've hopefully saved your your chips up, um, you've got that client buy-in to then say, well, actually, let's talk about this next bit, let's let's see whether actually this continues to be true. Let's use rational logic to see whether this next bit is true as we kind of go go deeper from situation to beliefs about the self and others in the world. And yeah, I'm slightly regretting only scheduling half an hour for this um discussion because we've only got a couple of minutes left. I'd love to go a bit bit deeper on it.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

We'll just do nine, we'll just do nine of these half an hour.

SPEAKER_00 25:12

We'll just do nine and a half an hour.

SPEAKER_01 25:14

Yeah. I will say that that I will say that look in any job that you care about or any endeavor that you care about, relationships, work, sport, school, whatever it is, as human beings, we're we're a mobile species, so we have to move to places and we need to know where to move to. So we have goals, we're we're a goal-directed species, and uh it's very difficult to get away from that. So people will have goals. And if you pursue a goal, you'll fail because you're imperfect, you're fallible, and the world is uncertain and uncontrollable. These are the perfect perfect setting for failure, right? So what are you gonna do? When you uh are approaching a goal and you get the sense that you're not you're not getting what you want, you're gonna experience a negative emotion. If your reaction to that is it's a catastrophe and I'm useless and I'm a failure, then the chances of you being able to continue to pursue that goal is quite limited. So instead of saying, Well, how do we make it so that you never fail, or when you do fail, you just perceive it differently, so and pretend that you haven't failed. You're you're denying quite a core part of the human experience. Negative emotion isn't a bad thing. It's there's a reason that we have it, it's extremely adaptive. What we want to help people to do is to not then take that into uh maladaptive, dysfunctional, uh you know, I'm withdrawn and I'm constantly anxious and I'm so angry that I start uh you know being violent and aggressive. I want to curb that maladaptive side of emotion. So it you know, and that's one of the things that RBTs uh quite uh quite keen on in that sense. Okay, look, this is bad. You failed, you've been rejected, whatever it is. Okay, well, let's first job, let's not make it worse with the way that we are uh thinking about this situation, but let's not make it worse. Then we can think about well, how do we actually make this better? And how do we potentially stop this from happening again? We get that proactive, proactive side of RBT as well. So I think it's really important that uh that that we don't challenge uh everything that the client says that we might think is negative, yeah, but we wait, we wait for the for that moment where they're taking it into an area that we can't support based on logic and rationality.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

Yep, yeah. I mean that that makes complete sense and it's nice when things make sense. And my experience of it in workshops, the tiny bit of of of it I've I've used in in applied practice, I've I've enjoyed that that side of it. And I think the the summary that you paint in terms of the kind of the general picture of the human condition and how we're set up for failure. I think even though you you could take that uh in in quite a kind of pessimistic way, is actually quite optimistic because you're saying that these these these things are these things are going to happen and you are not alone.

SPEAKER_01 28:11

It's miraculous that we succeed. You know, it's miraculous that we've got ourselves into a position of civilization that we're able to do things so well. You know, that we've we we've structured a society where for the most part we're doing all right. That's that's that's almost a miracle. The fact that we are set up to fail, we are we are we have inbuilt imperfections. We we in a brutal world which we've made less brutal through becoming more civilized. These aren't these aren't light things, these are big things, you know, but the core remains that we have potential to fail. So you know, having rigid and extreme beliefs about failure and and using failure as a reason for me to then say, well, I am useless and I am failure and I'm worthless, when all that failure proves is that I'm a human being, that I'm fallible, all I'm doing is showing my humanness. It doesn't make sense for me to then take that uh take my failure as evidence that I'm stupid or that I'm an idiot or that I'm useless. We should really look at those uh successes and say that that's miraculous that we can put things together so well and do these amazing things with such capacity for failure, you know.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

And seeing it in that way is a lovely, uplifting way, I think, to to finish. And and very quickly before we do the part, again, you're you're the first new guest to experience this part of the format. But I'm gonna start asking people this final question, which is around what's the one book podcast, movie, or TV show that has impacted you the most personally or professionally. I like the idea we can collect a little treasure trove of of these things as we go on the podcast. So yeah, what is that one book podcast, movie, or TV show that has impacted you the most?

SPEAKER_01 30:03

I would say the movie that's impacted me the most. I'll go for movie because it's more fun.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

Nice.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

Um would be the The Matrix.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

Oh right.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

I think it came out in 1999. I remember it well. I was I think I was too young to uh I was too young to see it in the cinema saw when the VHS came out. I basically wore that thing out, you know. But it it it was the first time that it had me questioning uh questioning reality, really. And opened the door for me to philosophy and things I would circle back to later in life. Philosophy that's nested within the matrix that you can you can spend an entire lifetime studying. So I'll find that movie going back to it uh incredibly deep at a conceptual level, but also obviously very entertaining as well, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Oh, so good. Well, let's both take the blue pill. It is the blue pill, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Teleport back out the podcast. Thank you so much, Martin, for for joining. Really appreciate you you sharing your experience in in a very kind of potted and focused way, and I'm sure we'll we'll have to do a part or two down the line. Sounds good, Pete. Thank you for the invitation again. Always good to talk to you. Thanks. Much appreciated.

Full time reflection

SPEAKER_00 31:13

So there we have it, another slice of pie in the books and a cracking conversation with Martin there. Absolutely jam-packed with REBT nuggets. And I've brought down my reflection on this episode to three key areas. So the first is about language and how the language of failed targets, in my eyes, might not be particularly helpful as it's a piece of language within the environment which is almost priming us to think about things as a failure. But it was interesting that Martin's response here was to maybe just call a spade a spade. Yes, you have failed to meet the target, but you are not a failure as a human being because of this. Now, when I put the discussion guide together, I was really looking forward to my observation about language and labelling and how potentially environments could rewire all or nothing thinking by tweaking the language that's used. But Martin kind of stopped me in my tracks here, and I really loved the perspective because yes, you could change the language to something else. You could call it a learning opportunity, not failure, or growth, not failure, but you have failed and you didn't meet the target, and you can sugarcoat it or reframe it, but you didn't. And that's fine because we are going to fail a million times in our lives, and those hurdles are always going to be there. They might not always be cleared, and getting skilled at responding to that in how we react and what we tell ourselves, and our underlying beliefs about that failure, those are the key skills being developed. Now, the second reflection is about identity, and this is a theme that tends to come up time and time again on the podcast. And again, it's this idea that you are not what you do. This cropped up again. And I like the elemental and directness of Martin's quote: the only true statement is that you are a human being. It reminded me of the third episode going way back a few years, where we talked with Leon Lloyd from Switch the Play. And Leon talked about developing more sides to this concept of me, helping to balance identity across a number of different sources and ensuring it's not just tied up in my job or sport. And I think this ties back into the settings that Martin talks about, which are really driven by outcomes. And he notes that sometimes people can be perceived in these environments as only valued for what they can make or what they can produce or achieve. And it's quite easy to then internalise I'm only valuable when I'm succeeding. And the real danger is it's kind of reversing that to when I'm not succeeding, I'm worthless and a failure. And it's interesting, in the last couple of years, I've become a father, our second little scamp, joined our family in February this year. And I can kind of identify a little bit with this productivity identity dynamic. Because when you become a parent, it's incredibly hard to remain as productive as you were before in many areas of life. You know, it could be work, it could be personal fitness, it could be keeping up with friends, and you have all these new considerations and time commitments. And don't get me wrong, it's amazing, but it's it's quite easy to notice your comparative lack of productivity and maybe a perceived lessening of your identity as a result. And I think Martin's wise words here are worth remembering that the only true statement is you are a human being, an imperfect, fallible one, just like the rest of us. And this idea of fallibility and imperfection links to the third and final reflection, which is about normalizing. And there is a brilliantly simple and logical line of thinking through ROBT, the way that Martin articulates it, that can normalize failure as not this awful thing, but part and parcel of the human experience and our journey through it. So, number one, as human beings, we're a mobile species. We have to move from place to place and know where to move to, and therefore we have goals. We are a goal-directed species. And if you pursue goals, you will fail at some point because number one, you are imperfect and you are fallible. And number two, the world is uncertain and uncontrollable. And this is almost the perfect ingredient and the perfect setting for failure. So, what are you going to do about that? You are going to experience negative emotions, and these are negative emotions are completely fine, it's adaptive, but what is the reaction to that? Can we curb the maladaptive responses to negative emotions and create healthier negative emotional responses? And I thought I like this normalizing these types of experiences as part of the human condition. I feel like it's often quite helpful to do that because it makes us feel less singled out or atypical. It's something that everyone will deal with to a greater or lesser extent. And in fact, as Martin asserts, it's miraculous if we actually succeed given that we are set up to fail in the first place. Now, if you are interested in going further into ROBT and its applications in sport, I would definitely recommend Martin's book. I'm tinkering away on it at the moment. I'm I'm in the chapter around goals, and it's it's really interesting. So I'll leave a link to that in the episode description if you're interested. So that's it for this episode. We'll have another one coming out soon with Duncan Simpson from the IMG Academy. But until then, wishing you every success in your next failure. Have a good one.