If anyone tells you you can manage your stress better, they’re lying to you.
Can you manage what’s going on in the stock market, the government, or the fact that sometimes drivers will run a red light and accidentally hit you? NO!
At the end of the day, there is no such thing as stress management. But being the adaptation machines that we are as human beings, the good news is that we can build our capacity to better handle the different stressors that life throws at us.
And in today’s episode, Dr. Erik Korem reveals exactly how to do that.
Dr. Erik Korem is a High-Performance thought leader that introduced sports science and athlete
tracking technologies to collegiate and professional (NFL) football. He has worked with the National Football League, Power-5 NCAA programs, gold-medal Olympians, Nike, and the United States Department of Defense. Erik is an expert in sleep and stress resilience and holds a doctorate in Exercise Science.
Erik is also the Founder and CEO of AIM7, a health and fitness app that unlocks the power of wearables by providing you with daily personalized recommendations for your mind, body, and recovery to help you look, feel, and perform your best.
In addition to his explanation of the 5 Pillars for Building Adaptive Capacity, Dr. Korem speaks on several contributing factors to the creation of AIM7, including:
- The foundational skills that gave him the edge he needed for entrepreneurship (11:30)
- How first-hand experience opened his eyes to building adaptive capacity (17:00)
- How to create the conditions to develop mental fitness (28:40)
- The failures of wearable tech – why they DON’T change long-term behavior (56:45)
How to connect with Erik:
Adaptation – Erik’s Newsletter
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TRANSCRIPTION
Brett Bartholomew 0:00
Brett Bartholomew, Hey, Brett here, jumping in for a moment. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, you’ve enjoyed some of the tips, techniques, conversations we’ve had. I just wanted to take a second to tell you more about all the other things we have at Art of Coaching, from live events to one to one, virtual mentoring to group mentoring and online courses, all of our outputs can help you, no matter where you are in life or your leadership journey.
We put an emphasis on the practical side of things. We are not here to preach. Our workshops are all very hands on and focus around experiential learning so you get real feedback, not a bunch of death by PowerPoint. Our virtual mentoring, we are able to adapt to your schedule. We worked with people in over 30 professions all across the globe, and we will pair you up with a coach that can give you the tough feedback you need and the encouragement that you deserve.
So whether you’re looking for a mentor, whether you’re looking for an online course, whether you’re looking for an event to be a part of, so you can come connect with people in real time we got you. Just check us out at artofcoaching.com. Again, that’s artofcoaching.com. Or reach out to our team to figure out what the best fit is for you by emailing info@artofcoaching.com
This episode of The Art of Coaching podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. Let’s say you’re somebody that’s taking your first real step in getting healthier. Maybe you’re improving your sleep, maybe you’re trying to work on your nutrition. This is where I kind of think of my mom or dad as the archetype. My mom calls and says, Hey, brett, what should I take you do all these supplements?
And really, I’ve told my mom this about 36 times, but she forgets things. People forget things. They’re busy. There’s a lot of information. There’s always some new guru telling you to take some pill, some lotion. Do this, do that. Block all that out. I simply tell my mom, my dad, my annoying friend who wants to call for advice. I love you, Brad. Take Athletic Greens. It’s as straightforward as it gets, and for less than $3 a day, it is a small microhabit with big benefits, and it can knock out a lot of your concerns.
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Welcome to the Art of Coaching Podcast. I’m Brett Bartholomew, and at a young age, poor communication nearly cost me my life. Now, I help others navigate the gray area of social interaction, power dynamics and communication so they can become more adaptable leaders, regardless of their profession, age or situation, this podcast is for everybody who is fascinated with solving people problems. So if you’re in the no nonsense type who appreciates frank conversations, advice you can put to use immediately and learning how others navigate the messy realities of leadership, you’re in the right place. I’m glad that you’re joining us. Let’s dive in.
Today I’m joined by Dr Erik Korem. Dr Korem is a high performance thought leader that introduced a wide variety of sports science and athlete tracking technologies to collegiate and professional football. He’s worked with the NFL Power Five NCAA programs, gold medalist in the Olympics, Nike and the United States Department of Defense.
Moreover, he’s an expert in sleep and stress resilience, and a lot of this ties in with his own personal stories, which I’m excited for you to hear more about. He’s the founder and CEO of a company called Aim7, which is a health and fitness app that helps unlock the power of many of the wearables that people buy and give them personalized recommendations that are practical and efficient.
So if you’re somebody that’s dealt with stress in your life, which how many of us can say that we honestly haven’t, and you’re always looking for ways to pragmatically improve the way you deal with and adapt to that stress, I think you’ll really enjoy this episode. Tune in, listen up, and as always, make sure that you check out our reflections page at artofcoaching.com/reflections, it’s complete with notes and prompts for you to take the most out of any of these episodes you listen to. All right. Without further ado, here is Dr Korem.
Everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Art of Caching podcast. I am here with Erik Korem Eric, nice to have you, buddy.
Dr. Erik Korem 5:07
It’s great to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity with your grandiose bookshelf. It’s nice you got a great background going there.
Brett Bartholomew 5:14
Do you like the painted mural of you? I had an artist come in and do that
Dr. Erik Korem 5:19
The statue of David was pretty good. I liked it with my head on it. Good job.
Brett Bartholomew 5:23
It’s a shame for anybody that’s not seeing this, you know, and they’re listening in their car. We really have a lot of unique inspiration. That one that you see behind me is Christy Brinkley, circuit day, 1989 with your head on her body. Ai did that for me. Chat GPT,
Dr. Erik Korem 5:38
Thank you. Chat GPT, or what is it, Dolly, or whatever. Bart. I don’t know which one it is now, whichever large language model, but yeah, you got even the details of the.on the forehead down
Brett Bartholomew 5:51
Absolutely Well, listen. It is very rare that I get to have a conversation with a friend, somebody that I have this much history with on the podcast. Of course, we have some great acquaintances, and I have some friends in the past, but we try to space those things out so people don’t just think it’s the Brett Bartholomew bring your friend to work lunch hour.
But listen, we have a lot of things that we’re going to get into. I would love for you just to give a brief introduction. Anybody that hasn’t heard of you, you’ve spent so much time in elite sport in the past, you have your PhD, you’re incredibly accomplished. But what’s the above the fold headline for the person listening? That’s like, Who is this person? What the heck are they going to talk about? And why should I care?
Dr. Erik Korem 6:30
Yeah, I appreciate it. I’ve spent about 16 years in college and professional sports. Started as a strength conditioning coach, and then in 2011 kind of had a change in career paths. I was at Florida State University with Jimbo Fisher. After the first season, he made me the Director of Operations. Huge Record scratch on that one. And you’re going to love this. Brett, I don’t tell this very often, but Coach Fisher’s like, I want you to do this job. It’s like the GM role, you know, basically. And I’m like, Okay, Coach, I’ll do it. Name me the Director of Sports Science too.
He’s like, you could call yourself whatever you want. That job did not exist. He had no clue. He’s like, Yeah, whatever. So I go to the ad. I’m like, hey, put this on my titles. Like, what is like? Don’t worry about it. So it was 2011 I went to Australia because I wanted to learn about sports science and athlete tracking brought back these 12 tracking devices, convinced the head coach to let us use them on our athletes. Had to hire a former NASA propulsion engineer for duct taping these pads, these devices the pads of the players, and quantified the game of football for the first time.
Use that to kind of reverse engineer a bunch of stuff. Long story short, next season, we had an 88% reduction in injury, not because of the data, but because of what we did. And it literally. After that season, the NFL flew in eight people, and they’re like, what is happening here? And it opened a multi billion dollar market for sports wearables and data. And then my career went off into sports science, went to Kentucky, got a PhD, and then in 2019 I got really curious about the consumer wearable market.
I’m like, Hey, you got all these people with Fitbits and Apple watches. I wonder if they know how to use this data, kind of like in football. We had no clue at the beginning. The answer is no. So as an academic, a buddy of mine at the University of Iowa, we just started doing started doing surveys testing the idea, probably like you did early days, like, is this thing going to be a viable product? And we wanted to know what people wanted from their wearables. People were like, We want more energy. So we tested this. We built models where we could predict people’s energy and mood levels multiple days in advance. Had these AI experts in NC State validated
Brett Bartholomew 8:42
So time out, just for the the average listener, right? You’re saying you could predict people’s energy. Let like, if my mom was coming down here to help us move, I could say, hey mom, on Thursday, if you’re wearing the wearable dude, you might feel this. Is that what you’re saying
Dr. Erik Korem 8:57
Yeah, yeah, we could actually predict our energy and mood state. And multiple days in advance, and then we could identify things people could do to change that outcome. It’s pretty interesting, algorithms. And I had a friend I was going through this program at the time called the Presidential Scholars, okay, and it was started by the Bush and Clinton Foundation, I don’t even know if you know this, and the LBJ foundation, so both Bushes, the Clintons and the lbjs, two Democrats, two Republicans
And they pick 60 scholars a year. And I was the dumb coach that got invited. Everybody else is a politician, CEO, like, whatever, and changed my life, like, absolutely changed my life. I gotta sit with the former presidents and their administrations for seven months and get trained on executive leadership negotiations. And so I’m on a bus ride, and I got this idea in my head about some things, and I tell this guy named Mark Haydar. Mark has one of the best TED talks you’ve ever heard. Is an immigrant.
Long story short, came. Here in America with a couple 100 bucks in his pocket, just sold a company to IBM, massive exit. And I’m like, Hey, got this idea is I go test it. So we tested I brought him back the data. He’s like, little did I know he had this thing, and then he has a company that’s very similar to my company, now called My company’s Aim7 and they have the largest car fleets in the world. They pull the data off of all these cars, and they make it useful
Brett Bartholomew 10:24
Car fleet. Sorry, just go back and contextualize this a little bit for the listener. What car fleets in what aspect like he’s a wholesaler. What does he do?
Dr. Erik Korem 10:34
ALD, these massive car fleets in like Europe, like everything from FedEx to UPS, service trucks.
Brett Bartholomew 10:40
SoSo like, logistics and service oriented kind of car
Dr. Erik Korem 10:43
Yeah. So they were basically like a wearable on a human. They’re pulling all these data off of these cars and be like, here’s how you use it. So I show them this and what we’re doing. He’s like, This is amazing. Writes me a check. And that’s what I’m like, Oh, crap, I gotta do this. And spent several months thinking it over, and I, let’s call it 2021, I was like, This is what I felt like I was called to do.
So I left sports. A lot of people thought I was nuts. Had some pushback, even for my boss, she said I was being hasty in my decision making, and I, we can talk about that later, but it took a made a career transition from elite sport to being a startup founder. It’s been wild.
Brett Bartholomew 11:29
I was gonna say there’s a lot baked in there. And so I want to start with one kind of fundamental question first, and then we’ll cycle back into the tech and and the job to be done in the inciting incident. But I’d love to know this right, having been somebody that crossed over from sports performance myself, I found it really interesting that you look around, you don’t see that much, right?
We see that in military, we see that in tech, we see that in medical. You see that in a lot of other industries. But if you did see anything in sports, it was usually, you know, like a head football coach or a basketball coach, like, they have their own brands, they have their own businesses. They’re on car commercials, but you don’t really see a lot of that from the sports performance side of thing. I mean, it’s happening more and more now
I have to ask, you know, if you were explaining to folks, because so many of them don’t know about that industry, the relevance, like, Hey, you came from sports performance. What the hell does that have to do anything with my world? How did you do that? And I can contextualize that. If that question doesn’t make sense, but I just found that I had to explain. Since there were so few people from sports performance, I had to help people understand.
Well, listen, I had assets under management every day. I’m training these. Okay, now the guys at Wells Fargo, get it or hey, I’ve got to negotiate with difficult personalities every day in order to have them do things they don’t always inherently want to do. Oh, okay, I get that. How did you help people make sense of that so they didn’t just see you as some gym guy, some data guy, some sport guy.
Dr. Erik Korem 12:55
That’s a great question. First of all, my experience in management at Florida State helped, you know, so it was a $300 million organization, if you look at the value of it, and I was managing 24 $28 million budget, every part of logistics, from travel to camps to hiring to Team court and all that stuff. So those almost three years were like a senior level manager role, right? You’re a VP or a C suite executive.
And then when it comes to technology, there’s, you know, they’re always looking for what’s your edge. Deep domain expertise is an edge. Team is an edge. A technological leap is an edge. And they are always pattern matching. When I say they like venture capitals, people are going to invest in this stuff. So the number one question they have was me as a business leader, as a CEO, I didn’t really have that experience, to be honest, and there’s been some serious bumps in the road because of that.
But at the same time, I also had the expertise to go from here to here, from zero to one, and then the idea of how to put together a good team, how to build a culture, all of those things translated. It hasn’t always been smooth, but it’s also what now we’re a team of nine people. We have a very good culture, a great esprit de corps, and so you have to learn really quick. And so I just did what I think anybody else would do. I read books, I talked to people that had done it, and I listened to a gajillion podcasts, and just started creating mental models.
Brett Bartholomew 14:39
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the thing that many people mistake, make the mistake of doing right they they have to get that outside language and vocabulary to be able to relate those things a little bit more clearly to folks, because there are certain industries that those things are just a bit more evident. Somebody comes from the military. Oh, okay. Like, yeah, we inherently get this. Not a lot of people see inside the walls of this. Performance realm. By the way, you’re one of the only other people I’ve ever heard in my life use esprit de corps, which I love.
You know that feeling of pride and camaraderie, that’s awesome. I have to ask this then, did you ever find it ironic, given how much you do on burnout now, and I want you to elaborate on this, our audience will love it, because we have a number of resources on burnout too, where you know you were measuring so much about how athletes, for a long period of your life adapt to stress, how they become more resilient under stress, but then now you jumping into becoming an entrepreneur.
You almost, in a way, reverse those roles. You become your own client, because new levels, new devils. Now you have to manage your stress. I’m sure you would agree, but feel free to fire back if you don’t. True balance is impossible. There’s no way to game the system. Like entrepreneurship is not easy for anybody. So did you find that kind of intriguing? Of like, Huh? Now, now I’m kind of having to manage my own stress at a com at a completely different level. After making this leap, I’d love for you to chat about that a little bit more and maybe how that inspired your interest in burnout, stress management and some of the things you guys do today?
Dr. Erik Korem 16:07
Yeah, I’m gonna answer that in a couple ways, and I think there’s some irony in this. First of all, what we do at AIM7 is we build adaptive capacity for regular folks. We teach them how to adapt to stress. Okay, so that is actually our product. This is where it gets funny. In my opinion, you can’t manage stress, like, can we manage what’s going on in the stock market? Can we manage what’s going on in the government? No
Can we manage that? I pull out an intersection and somebody hits me? No, all you can do is adapt to the situation. And there is no off button in entrepreneurship, right? For the first time, I really kind of understood why some of these head coaches, like, after a couple years, they physically change, right? Because all of a sudden, heavy is the crown, right? Like you want to assume that role. It gets very deep and heavy, and I learned a very valuable lesson. We were only a few months in Brett, and there’s something called the MVP, a minimal viable product, right?
So it’s like the smallest version of the thing that you want to build, right? And before we had an app and all this stuff, it was a text messaging service to test. Is this a viable solution? And we would suck in the data. We would text people recommendations. Well, the first day this is going live paying customers, the text messaging pipeline broke. Now my cadence for life had been seven day intervals of it’s Saturday, it’s game day. The whole world’s gonna judge you. Or ESPN, right? Yep. And I like, I had this overwhelming stress response, and things weren’t going great at the very beginning, and I went on a walk one day, and I was doubled over, and I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I was having a panic attack,
Brett Bartholomew 18:09
Like full Ted lasso style panic attack?
Full Ted lasso, itit happened again. And I’m laying on my bed at night, and my wife walks in the room, she’s, it’s like, not even at night, it’s like, six o’clock. She’s like, what’s going on? I was like, this is going is going to kill me
And real quick, Erik, like, what was that? How did that manifest for you? Like, were you? Were you hyperventilating? Just because people feel Yeah,
Dr. Erik Korem 18:31
My chest was tightening. My heart rate was up. I was like, kind of getting this tunnel vision. It was just like an overwhelming sense of almost like it was a weird mix of grief and fright or terror, and I felt like a failure. And my wife was like, Erik, you gotta figure a way out of this thing. I mean, you’re an expert in stress, right? This is when I learned something really important. Brett stress inoculation.
People are like, gotta get tough, right? You can’t be tough to everything. It’s impossible there’s a reason that Fort Benning Georgia exists. Fort Benning Georgia is where they have jump school for the army and really a lot of other services come there. If I take a trained navy seal that’s never jumped out of a plane, I put them up in a plane and put them to the edge of the plane, say, jump what is he going to experience? A massive stress response? He’s going to freak the you know what out?
Brett Bartholomew 19:35
Sure, it’s all relative, but the stress response is there, right? Like it’s he’s going to have probably less of a stress response than my neighbor, who’s never done anything of a sore like that, but if
Dr. Erik Korem 19:45
your life’s threatened, you’re still gonna feel it freak out. Hell yeah. So what do they do at Fort Benning Georgia? They start they teach you how to jump by like you jump off a 10 foot thing and roll and fall, and then they put you in a foam pit. And then there’s this massive tower that’s 200 something feet tall, and they slow incrementally over. Three or four weeks, and then finally, you’re ready to jump.
Early on. If you are faced with a massive amount of stress, you can have a traumatic incident. What I had to learn was, is like, Okay, how to scale that stress and my exposure to it, and then how to be like, how to reframe the situation. So my software developers, like Eric, you’re gonna have to get some thick skin. Dude.
Brett Bartholomew 20:24
And did you have this guy, just because we’re jumping into you had the panic attack, you’re doing this. But was this before you had a team? Was this when you had a team? Was this immediately when you jumped into, like,
Dr. Erik Korem 20:34
small team. One other guy honest to this, and he was like, Erik, you’re gonna have to get thick skin. He goes, this is software. Things break all the time. Apple has bugs. Everybody has bugs. I’ll tell you a little time out. There’s a company that had raised all of this money, Silicon Valley, darling, I was beta testing your product, and it shut down for two and a half days, and I was like, fist pumping in the air, because I was like, Yes. Like, it happens to everybody. Of course, yeah. But like, not that. I was cheering for them to fail because I knew their CEO, but I was like, it made me feel like it’s gonna happen.
I had to learn to, like, restructure my mindset, and then tap into all the things that I knew, the five pillars for building capacity. And then there was a few of them that I was lagging in and I had to invest in number one was there’s five pillars for building adaptive capacity, sleep, exercise, mental fitness, nutrition and community. As a entrepreneur, you know that it is very isolating, sure, and if you do not deliberately engage in human to human interaction and share those burdens with other people. It can cripple you.
Ali Kershner 21:46
Hey, Art of Coaching family, just a quick break in the action. I want to give you a heads up that our early bird pricing for the next apprenticeship, which is being held at the absolutely stunning play headquarters in Atlanta, is ending very soon. So please do not miss your chance to save some money and join us. July 29 and 30th. Listen back before I joined Art of Coaching about two years ago, the apprenticeship was the first event I ever attended, and I cannot begin to describe how much it has evolved and grown since then, but the main mission has remained the same.
The bottom line is, if you want to become more self aware, understand your communication and leadership strengths and weaknesses, which, by the way, we all have you want practice navigating hard conversations, if you want to know what you should say at a negotiation or a job interview to land the position that you want, or even if you just want to be able to get your thoughts across in the way that you actually intended. This is the workshop for you, and it’s truly one of a kind.
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So don’t miss out on our early bird pricing ending soon, and we’ll see you at play headquarters, just outside Atlanta on july 29, and 30th. You can go to artofcoaching.com/plae P, L, A, E, for tickets, more information, all of that good stuff. Now back to the episode.
Dr. Erik Korem 23:29
If you do not deliberately engage in human to human interaction and share those burdens with other people, it can cripple you. And for me, it was like I moved back to Houston because I knew this was going to be hard. I didn’t know how hard, and I had a community here, and I just started calling up my my friends. I was like, Listen, I need to see you, like, once or twice a week so I can just talk and, like, fellowship, just like, be around a community.
Like I used to have a team, and when you’re on a team and it sucks. You all go through the suck together, right? You’re physically in the locker room. You’re physically in the office. You can there’s something about commiserating together, right? You lose. You’re like, it sucks, right? I didn’t have that. I had a screen.
Brett Bartholomew 24:13
Now, were these fellow entrepreneurs? Were these just friends in general, friends. Okay, so the first part of this capacity, for you, building this capacity was almost kind of leaning into community and finding you know folks that you could interact with. Because, as you mentioned, social interaction is so critical to just mental health and overall wellness in general.
Dr. Erik Korem 24:32
Absolutely, I think it was. There was a paper in the British Psychological Society that looked at social connectedness during the pandemic periods, and they found that people that had greater social connectedness and didn’t isolate as much had lower perceived levels of stress. So basically, like there was this buffer that was created against physical and mental stress. And what just came out from the Surgeon General, we are in a pandemic of loneliness when you isolate people. You unhinge them,
And so one of those five pillars that you need is relationships. And I needed to intentionally engage with other people, and that just started bringing the temperature down, so to speak. That was one of the things for me, like, exercise wasn’t a problem. I figured out a way to do that. Sleep wasn’t a problem. Nutrition wasn’t a problem. The two things that I needed to double down on was community and what I call mental fitness.
Brett Bartholomew 25:30
Well, real quick, can I ask you a question here? Real quick, yeah. And admittedly, I’m biased. I’m with you on the social interaction piece. We have a nonprofit that when the middle of building, and this is all tied into my doctorate about just social health and all cause mortality. I mean, people even saying that this now is up there with smoking and obesity and so it’s wild to me. I think that it’s taken us so long, or the pandemic maybe, to figure out a social interaction is literally why we’re at the top of the food chain.
We’re the predominant social animal. So I love that you mentioned that, because it’s something that we can so easily forget about because we all get stuck in this busyness rut. But I have to ask one just curious, because you and I are friends, but we haven’t had this conversation before. Why did you have a tendency to maybe go internal and not necessarily isolate yourself? But what led to that? Was it a was it just a fixation on the business?
Dr. Erik Korem 26:20
It wasn’t a choice. I’m I’m literally at my house, and it’s just me in an office, and because of the relationship to the pandemic period. But this is a late November 2020 I moved to Houston. It’s 2021 there’s lots of parts United States, so they’re still shut down, and it was easier to get talent, tech talent, remotely. So I didn’t have anybody working next door to me. It was just me all day.
Brett Bartholomew 26:48
Did you have any kind of virtual community that you interacted with?
Dr. Erik Korem 26:53
You know, it’s not like you’re gonna be on a zoom call for four hours.
Brett Bartholomew 26:56
Sure you wanted somebody that you could kind of have a beer with, hang out with, be in the same space with physical, true face to face, a
Dr. Erik Korem 27:02
hug, a freaking like, DAP, it up and, like, you know, joking around, yeah, all that kind of stuff. And so I had to find a way to get that. It was, had to be an intentional part of my rhythm of doing this with other people. And I, you know, we go to church on Sunday, have a group there. But it was like dudes that I had other friends that were entrepreneurs in the area. One guy’s a real estate agent. Heand I can call each other and talk about this, how lonely it is, how hard it is, the grind.
It’s not complaining. Sometimes it’s strategies. Sometimes it’s dude, how you doing? Sure. And so you then start to gravitate it’s like in sports, like you’re in sports format, you call people up about whatever. Are you dealing with? This? Dealing with that? I just had to do it more intentionally in my neighborhood.
Brett Bartholomew 27:49
Got it? Yeah. So that’s the first. I have more questions I could ask for that, but I want to get you through your capacities, so maybe we can circle back to some things, because I’d love to know how you being married, and how that you and your wife kind of showed up to support one another. But please, let’s get through let’s get through your capacities. I want to hear these things first, and we can circle back.
Dr. Erik Korem 28:06
Yeah, so adaptive capacity, by the way, is like you only have a limited amount of the way I like to look at it as like a gas tank in your vehicle, right? Everybody has so much capacity to adapt to stress. The great thing is that capacity can get bigger. You know this from basic biological principles of training people, but adaptive capacity can be built. Like I said in these five different pillars of scientific literature, is very clear, sleep, exercise, mental fitness, nutrition and living and community.
The other one that I needed to work on, because, we’ll just structure this around my story was mental fitness. And we kind of have a definition of mental fitness to kind of parallel psychological flexibility. It’s like the ability to be consciously present and to process information without bias. So like as and this empowers you to like, respond quickly, but in line with your values, really close to psychological flexibility.
And so when you’re mentally fit, you’re aware. And my problem is, and this is where I think people will connect to, is chasing those squirrels in my head, I connect to a thought or an idea that doesn’t really exist, like anxiety is the anticipation of a future event that most likely will not occur, right, or the outcome of something. And I heard a story that really changed things for me. Have you ever heard of Chris Hoy before?
Brett Bartholomew 29:31
No
Dr. Erik Korem 29:32
Sir. Chris Hoy is the greatest Olympic cyclist of all time. He’s six Olympic gold medals. Go look up this dude. He’s a fierce looking competitor. And somebody asked Chris what it was like to race in an Olympic finals, and he said it felt like he was going to the gallows, like he was going to die. If the outcome of a future event is uncertain and important, you should expect to feel pressure and. Negative.
You know emotions that may be, you know negative, if you’re open to that, to these negative thoughts and feelings, it doesn’t have to dictate how you perform. So like, I went from a world of like. So for me, I had to start becoming aware and training my mind. Erik, you’re thinking about this thing over here. Now let’s gain back control, and let’s take action anchored in what you value. Does that make sense?
Brett Bartholomew 30:29
Yeah. I mean, listen, people hate uncertainty, right? This is basic consumer behavior psychology and just human 101, we hate uncertainty. We crave control. We are a mess, and we often fall victim to our own internal chatter over analysis, tendencies, all those pieces. So yeah, it makes sense with everything you’re saying so far. I think one I want to hear where you took this and how you kind of found that control in your life, and then relating it kind of to, you know, there’s so many people that they feel stuck, and maybe they’re just kind of in this state of functional fixedness. They have the opportunity to control more things than they think, but they’re so close to the problem they don’t really
Dr. Erik Korem 31:10
Fixed this. That’s a great line. Sorry, go ahead.
Brett Bartholomew 31:14
Well, yeah, we’re just, we’re improv nerds over here, right? And people tend to see things one way. They tend to see, oh, this thing that I’m holding up. This is for people that aren’t seeing it. This is a container of Eclipse gum, right? But it could easily hold paper clips. It could do this. It could do that. This is goes into measures of creativity. How many uses can you find for a brick? It doesn’t really matter from a divergent thinking standpoint, if somebody comes up with 50 uses, but they’re all structural. If somebody else comes up with 10 uses, but one is structural.
One might be as a weapon, one might be sidewalk chalk. We want people that see things that can be used in different creative ways. So you can essentially, pardon my language, but my audience gets it turn shit into sugar. And like you said, you’re not gonna be able to control everything, but you can adapt it, which is a term that you’ve used freely, and I love so I’d love to know what that looked like. Were there things in your life that maybe, oh, like this could have been a solution all along, but I maybe even overthought it. Didn’t consider it, saw it as one thing. What were some of those things of how you adapted? I’m curious.
Dr. Erik Korem 32:17
Yeah, so one of the things I believe in is it’s like, let’s just take a bigger concept, and I’ll come back in 30 seconds sleep. That was my doctoral work. People are like, Oh, great. I need to know how to, you know, I get it. I need to sleep seven or nine hours. Well, how do I create the conditions for sleep? To me, it’s like, what things do I do to create the conditions where, guess what? I get tired at a certain time, and I fall asleep, and it’s restful and fulfilling. Coming back to this idea of mental fitness for me, it was a couple things.
One, I really doubled down, tripled down on actually training mindfulness, and I would do it in a lot of weird ways, so basic, like close my eyes, focus on my breath. Okay, that was the entry point for me. The next was going on mindful walks of like, being intentional, just honing out and like listening to the world. That’s another way of training this. Another thing for me was like getting in the sauna. And I love getting in the sauna, just sitting there and sweat, right?
And then, like, I would just, like, close my eyes and I would just focus on the beads of sweat coming off my body. And, like, really hone and guess what? The suffering started dissipating. The next thing from So mindfulness was one lean into prayer for me that was really helpful. Of, like, you know, whatever you think the bigger thing in the universe is that was something for me, of like, Hey, I’m not, I’m part of something, right?
And prayer was really important. I would also say that this sounds interesting, but walking, so if you had, have you heard of EMDR,
Brett Bartholomew 33:56
No, I haven’t heard of that.
Dr. Erik Korem 33:58
So it’s a light board, okay? And then a lot of psychologists use this. Now, it’s like, remember, like the knight rider that went across. It goes back and forth,
Brett Bartholomew 34:08
Sure, yeah, I get the idea of, yeah, oh, okay, yes. We use this for kids. Kids will use this help sleep as well. I mean, it’s funny. We have terms for these things now. I mean, even an old school lava lamp could be considered to leverage some of those principles as well. You just get used to a pattern, and it almost puts you in a trance like state, just watching the pattern and the movement of it all.
Dr. Erik Korem 34:27
Well, they found that the reason EMDR works, people will they’ll watch this thing go back and forth. They’ll keep their heads still and their eyes go back and forth, and then they will go through very traumatic experiences. It’s a processing technique. This came out of Stanford, where one of these professors found that when people went on walks and got into optic flow, it suppressed fear centers in the brain, and they were able to process traumatic information,
Traumatic experiences. And so going out and walking or getting into. Optic flow helps suppress these fear centers. So I started walking a lot. I wake up in the morning, I get up, I start walking during the afternoon, I try to get just take short five to 10 minute breaks, because my default mode is to go into gas pedal down.
Brett Bartholomew 35:17
I was just saying, do you have some things and feel free. You don’t need to get too personal if you don’t want but do you have some things in your past that maybe perpetuated some of these things? Because you mentioned, I’d love to just know it sounds like a lot of these things came back to managing quite a bit of what could be read as anxiety or whatever. I’d like to know what term you use. But when you think about mindfulness, when we think about walking, when we think about breathing, think about breathing, clearly, you get in ramp up mode.
That’s normal for any entrepreneur, you know. And normal is obviously good too, yeah, of course. But I’d love to know just even as your friend, right? Because I’ve known you as cool, calm, collected, you’re that guy. You’re Gene Hackman in the quick and the dead. But I think it’s empowering for people to say, Wow, here’s this guy that that. I mean, your voice, you sound like you could be a late night FM, DJ. You’re relaxing, you it’s like the picture of equanimity, but it sounds like you’ve got a lot of internal stuff going on. And if you wouldn’t mind sharing that, I think that would help a lot of people.
Dr. Erik Korem 36:15
Yeah, I was bullied a lot as a kid. Was really overweight. It was pretty hard, you know, like, sorry,
Brett Bartholomew 36:28
No, you’re fine. This is what,
Dr. Erik Korem 36:33
yeah, I mean, it was just like, it was growing up, sucked sometimes, like, really sucked, got beat up. I remember one time I went to the bus stop, I literally, like, just walked up, said hi to a friend, turn around fist. Next thing, I wake up. I’m on the ground. Wow. And it’s just, I don’t know, I grew up in a really interesting area, and I was picked on a lot. So now you start like these, you have this heightened sense of alertness, and then you get into this thought pattern in your head of like, I’m not good enough. I’m not, you know, I’m not loved by the I had a really good home life, but I would go to school, and it just sucked.
And then I found athletics, and athletics was a way for me to just like I was actually pretty good, you know, for a fat guy with small legs, anyways. And so, like, you know, I could like it laugh now, but, you know, sports became more to me than just like going out and competing. It was a way for me to excel and kind of break through this barrier. And so I would, I was constantly thinking and worrying what other people were thinking.
Come to find out now, most people are never thinking about you as a matter of fact, the world and the universe that they live in revolves around them, right? They’re going through these same thought patterns, but getting a hold that conversation like I think people win, chin up, and that’s why I think, with the work that you do is so important, that conversation, that Battle Between Your Ears, the words that come out, that you want to associate with, how you really think and feel so you can communicate effectively.
You know, if the thought patterns aren’t aligned, it all the other stress systems of the body get turned on. The body does not differentiate between physical or psychological stress, it turns on the same systems, the same. Now at the local the tissue level, it’s a little bit different, but like the HPA axis, the autonomic nervous system, the immune response, it’s all the same if I go out and do a crazy marathon or a really hard run, versus a psychologically draining experience.
And so if you can learn to deliberately turn on and turn off these systems, you can regain control, and you can build more capacity. So for me, it was like, this is the weakness, this is the chink in the armor. But I can also use it as a strength, if I lean into it, and I can learn from it become more compassionate around what maybe other people are feeling.
So, yeah, it’s something I constantly battle, but I’m getting better. Like I notice now, Erik, you’re thinking about we’re back on track. Now let’s get our head off of that that’s not even real pitching now I pitch all the time, like, we’re about to start a seed round, fundraise, right? And, you know, I’ve never met these people on the screen or that I’m talking to, and it’s like, well, you can either anticipate wonderful things or you can anticipate bad things.
And getting that, getting in that thought pattern of like, Hey, this is a great experience. This is going to be awesome. This is going to be this. It’s going to propel you forward. Those are all things I’ve learned how to train my mind for. And so I would just say to anybody that’s listening to this now, like, you’re not alone when it comes to this. The best in the world. Feel pressure and negative feeling. Links thoughts and emotions, and it’s a trainable skill that can have a ripple effect across every part of your life.
Brett Bartholomew 40:06
Sure. No, I think that’s really powerful. And I appreciate you, by the way, giving some more insight into your background, in the personal life, because I really think that helps anchor the work in a different way. So correct me, if I’m wrong, I think we’ve gone through three of those capacities, right? You’ve talked about sleep, you’ve talked about community, you’ve talked about, what do we what else did we hit on there
Dr. Erik Korem 40:28
So we talked about, we went down the rabbit hole on mental fitness. We and community sleep. I think it’s kind of obvious to people. You know, sleep is when our body recovers from stress, detoxification of your brain occurs hormonal pieces. So we don’t probably want to really go down that path,
Brett Bartholomew 40:45
No, but I like that you mentioned it because here’s my thing with this, right is, I think, and this is just something that as we get more and more into this one size fits all society that our organization is a little bit at war with, I do think that is an unhelpful narrative for people to be told. First of all, people are already told how much they should sleep, right? So it’s almost like when for new mothers out there.
I know my my wife, had a lot of moments of mom guilt when she didn’t feel like she was doing something that, oh, another mother said, or best practices for this, right? When you hear sleep, okay, I’ve got to get this many hours. And then it’s like, oh, that’s not enough. Now. You better get to sleep before midnight. Here’s the reality, all right, andI’m not championing anything I want you to be able to do. You’ll get the final word on this, but I’m not championing, hey, stay up at all hours. Do this. Do your own thing, whatever.
But there are a lot of great books, great albums, great movies, great things that were built by people that, you know what? They didn’t get all the sleep they needed. Some of these things were maybe the aha moment happened at 3am I do think it’s one thing to tell people like you do, Hey, be mindful of sleep. Find, you know, try to be consistent with what works for you and what they hear in the larger pseudoscientific community of it must be this amount at this time where you’re gonna die, you’re like, your dreams aren’t gonna have.
It’s just like, come on. Like, this isn’t we’re not building in the age of information, I feel like we’re actually building a less resilient society, because now everybody is so worried about optimization, as opposed to just like awareness and adaptation. It’s like, what do we do in here? But I’d love for you. I mean, feel free to say, Brett, you’re insane. I don’t believe everybody should be in sleep by 10pm, if you I just that’s something I have to get off my chest, because I’m getting really tired of logging on to all forms of social media at all time and somebody telling me exactly how much sleep I need to have and when that sleep better be, otherwise I couldn’t possibly get anything done. That’s high level.
Dr. Erik Korem 42:46
First of all, you’re exactly correct. The human body is an adaptation machine, right? So stress, first of all, is not the enemy. It’s the gateway to growth.
Brett Bartholomew 42:57
Good phrase
Dr. Erik Korem 42:58
You know, it’s the right dose of stress plus the right dose of rest. And so if you are investing in these five things at a certain level, something you’re building the capacity to here’s the thing, build the capacity to handle more with less cost. As an entrepreneur, I have to take on stupid amounts of stress. I am more resilient now than I was two years ago to everything, but I’ve had to build in certain practices in my life to build the capacity. Or guess what will happen? You will burn out, and you will end up in the hospital.
There are so many entrepreneurs that I know that have ended up in the hospital with serious issues because they just ignored it. Coaches. You’ve seen it so many coaches are just quitting, like it’s just too much. So here’s what I would say about sleep. There are some things that are very interesting in the scientific literature, duration, onset and timing do matter. The blend of the three is really interesting.
So there was a really cool paper. It was with 800,000 people in the UK Biobank. They used accelerometers. They used me data. This was done by the Harvard, the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT and University of Colorado. To me, this was fascinating. They wanted to do one of two things. First of all, look at chronotype. A lot of people like, Oh, I’m a night owl. Did you know that biologically, only 9% of people are evening types.
Brett Bartholomew 44:25
Listen,I’m one of those 9% I don’t care what you say, my mom’s in the room. She will, assert this to be true,
Dr. Erik Korem 44:31
And that’s true. That’s you, yeah. But research is pretty clear, if you’re just shifting your bedtime back one hour reduces the risk of major depression by 23% people that were going to bed at two, they went back to one, they had significant reductions in depression. The question is, is why? Like, okay, go to bed earlier. Why is this and this is like, I know I really hate to even say this, but because you’re going to laugh, but when I got my PhD, the first thing you learn about in sleep is like, what drives sleep?
And there’s two things. There’s a homeostatic drive, meaning like, as the day goes on, you get more tired. Duh. It’s a biochemical thing. Adenosine builds up. You want to go to bed. The second thing is a circadian process. Circadian means about 24 hours, and there are five, roughly five Zeit givers, or time givers, sleep, temperature, humidity, food and exercise and movement, sorry, light sleep, light food, temperature, humidity and exercise. The strongest one is light. If you literally put somebody in a cave for a long period of time, you will unhinge all biological process.
Brett Bartholomew 45:46
Oh, yeah. I mean, you see that, even if people use eye masks too much, you know, you could basically sleep through your alarm clock the morning the whole thing,
Dr. Erik Korem 45:52
Yeah, but I mean, like, mentally, you’ll break down. So, you know, like the Andrew hubermans of the world espousing, like, getting out and getting somebody, it’s true. It was the first thing that we learned. It’s the primary zeitgeber. Here’s the thing, people that go to bed earlier and wake up earlier, what do they get? They get more natural light. So if you are going to be grinding all the time, just it really does dramatically impact your health and wellness. That’s why people get seasonal mood affect disorders, because they live in the northeast, whatever, and they start using light boards.
Brett Bartholomew 46:24
Sure, there are some people that just, it’s going to be seasonal. They’re not going to get as much light as as other folks. Some people in northern European countries, that’s going to be the reality. Friend of mine lives in Alaska, control the controllables. But you know, even if they can’t do that right?right? Try to do what you can.
Dr. Erik Korem 46:40
Yeah, like, if for me, when it comes to sleep, a couple things, just get out early and often. That’s it. Get up in the morning, go for a 10 minute walk, anchor yourself to your biological surroundings, and then throughout the day, take a couple breaks and go outside and walk around. It’s gonna impact melatonin. You’re gonna feel like going to bed. And then, you know, just try to be consistent. If you’re always going to bed at midnight, just try to stay try to stay consistent with that, because it can lead to things like social jet like,
You know, I got a case of the Mondays. That’s because you have a sleeping pattern during the week and another one of the weekend. Now, I have three kids under the age of 11. Life gets crazy, and it’s not going to be optimal. So to your point, if you’re engaging in exercise and you’re eating rather healthy, you know most of the time, 75% of time, and you have a good sleep pattern when you can guess what, you’ll be robust to these perturbations of life.
I’m not pushing for optimization. I’m pushing for people just do some of the basics in these five areas, and you’ll be robust to when, Oh, crap, pedal down. Next six days is going to be a gauntlet. Let’s freaking go. And then it’s like you’ve built the capacity to do that, and on the back end, you’re not dead for four days. Yeah. Does that make sense? Sure.
Brett Bartholomew 47:56
I mean, it’s a thing that, again, it just goes into, I think sometimes there’s an unhelpful narrative that when people get out of rhythms, or they’re doing this, or a season of their life requires X, Y and Zed, if they don’t get it right, that they’re gonna crumble, and that’s just not the reality. And I think that’s most people don’t know. That’s even why you had to be very careful of what data you share with athletes. Listen, you got to get out there and perform regardless, like we’re in the process of a life change right now in this household, I still had two back to back events. I had to run inevitably, right?
We’d get done with the event. You come we’d get some food. We get hydration, but we’re going to start talking a little bit about the next day. A little bit you ramp up. Your mind gets going. I get to bed late on event weekend. Sometimes I get five to seven hours, and they’re usually not great hours. The next day, I’m still ready to do it, but I’ve built up that capacity, and sometimes it hurts more than others, depending on where I’m flying to or when I’m home. But I just, I think you’ve got to find that balance between doing what you’re saying and which I think is far more practical than what most people are espousing out there with with large platforms, there’s going to be times of imperfection, but try to be as consistent as you can and handle some other
And the people that are saying no, if you don’t get this, you’re they just want to, they want to use fear of you’re going to see this with your hormones, this with this, this with that. That doesn’t necessarily help the mother of four, who’s a single mother of four that’s trying to do X all these things, and they’re just not going to have that reality. Or somebody else that’s in the middle of a busy season there, it’s not going to be that reality.
We have to remember that if we can’t say on both ends, the world’s getting crazier, the world’s getting crazier, try to control it all, and it’s going to work. So I appreciate that you say at least when the thing breaks, at least make sure that you’ve built up these capacities so that you can adapt to that, as opposed to sitting
Dr. Erik Korem 49:45
Your moral Brett like this, you have to have heuristics, or rules of thumb for communication. If you don’t have any guess what you’re going to suck no doubt. If I don’t have these, I need to come and get education. Training, you just need to have a few basic things that are tenants in your life. And then, like, you know what? Sometimes I can invest more in one and the other one’s going to go down. That’s okay. But guess what you’ve done, you’ve built more bandwidth. And so, like, they’re perfect is not the goal.
None of we don’t have millions of dollars. We got all this free time, and we can go sit in our light beds. I don’t have a cold tub at my house. I don’t have any of that stuff. I’m regular human being. I’ve just learned to adapt to, you know what? I’m alone. Guess what? That sucks. My team’s all over the country. So what I do? I intentionally Hang out with friends. I need to move more, or else I won’t move at all. We know that if you don’t move very much, that’s not good for your longevity.
So I just take little five minute breaks and do a walk around my block. I try to It’s put me in the world of reality now, right? Like we don’t little you and I don’t live in gyms with cafeterias and everything for us anymore, this is real life, but you want to have some basic things that you have understanding of and habits built around because they will sustain you when the crap hits the fan.
Brett Bartholomew 51:06
No question. I do find it fascinating that how commoditized certain things like sleep training and nutrition have been, and then you look at the communication and social side of things, and granted, MIT, Amazon, other companies building a lot of that, and how that bakes into wellness. But it is ironic. I mean, we saw it early on. There are some people that they will pay for. All these things that track their sleep, track this, but the communication side, I’m good.
I’m like, really the one thing nearly guaranteed to make your life worse, you’re good on that. People don’t want to commoditize that, because it’s, you know, it’s almost in like, something’s personally wrong with me, as opposed to training and sleep and whatever. Well, these are things that I do, and it’s not really about my personality or quirks, but regardless, I would love to know what is this final capacity and anchor it where, like, what the aha moment was? Was it something you were good at, or you had to work on a lot as well. What’s his final one?
Dr. Erik Korem 52:03
Oh, yeah. So I guess the final pillar would be just nutrition. Yeah, yeah, it was just nutrition. And that’s just like some basic stuff, you know, like making sure you’re eating fruits and vegetables, making sure you’re eating protein, make sure you’re getting, you know, fat in your diet, that 90% of your diet is not Ultra processed foods. Yes, I eat Ultra processed foods, you know, probably 20% of the time. And I’m fine, which you don’t want us to be in a state of systemic inflammation, because, guess what?
That’s going to compromise adaptation. So like, it’s just basic, fundamental things repeated over time. We’re just leveraging technology to give people a measurement of where they are in these areas. And then we don’t tell them to focus on all of them at one time. Yeah, we’re like, we identify the one area that they need to work on right now and, like, take one tiny little step.
Brett Bartholomew 52:56
So is this something? They paint a picture in the mind of the audience. Do I wear this? Is it? How do you outfit folks with this? Just because there’s so many things out there, I think people would love to know a little bit more about what this looks like.
Dr. Erik Korem 53:09
Yeah. So the company’s called Aim7 and we are hardware data agnostic, which means we plug into everything. So right now, we’re end to end integrated with the Apple Watch, with the aura ring, with Garmin and any other app that you use. And what we do is this, we give you daily personalized recommendations for we say, mind, body and recovery. So let’s say you’re like, I love to go do the elliptical four times a week. I a hit class at my gym. Great. Aim7 will just tell you how hard to go today.
That’s it. Like, we’re not going to tell you not to do your favorite stuff. We’re going to give you the dose. Oh, today, when you for mental fitness, guess what? You’re stressed out. Here’s the precise tool that you use right now, from a breath work perspective, to help calm you down. Oh, your mood’s off. We’re going to push you a little gratitude intervention or based off of your travel schedule, you know, hey, maybe you dial it down a little bit on the exercise and you spend a little bit more time tonight, get 30 minutes extra of sleep.
It’s moldable. We built this for busy people and so. But what we also this pretty interesting, is, after seven days, is we analyze all your data, and we’re like in the areas of mind, body and recovery. Here’s the one area you should focus on, Forget trying to get good at everything at one time. And then here’s one tiny little action that you can take and just make small, micro changes and in the app, in the first 30 days, our average customer experience is double digit improvement in things like mood, 20% improvement mood and motivation, sleep energy, because what we’re doing is we’re helping them build more capacity.
And so it’s probably one of the most satisfying things that I’ve ever done, because last night, so this is not in the app store, so you it’s in private beta, which. Means that you have to go to the website and sign up. It’s only 15 bucks a month. Then the first month, you get four zoom calls with me and my team. Well, I bought a zoom call last night with an electrician from Charleston, South Carolina, a guy that’s on the other side of the country who he’s a software engineer like these are just random people that have been attracted to this. They’re busy.
One guy has to get up at four o’clock in the morning so he could sneak his workout in. The other person’s talking about depression. And they’re like, You know what? Like, we teach them this unique habit building methodology. But people are like, they’re attracted to this idea of, how do I build the capacity to adapt to stress with less cost? And that’s kind of the entry point you don’t have to this isn’t for fit craze people or people that are bio hackers or anything like that.
It’s like, the average person that’s got a Fitbit or an Apple Watch on and just wants to feel better but doesn’t have 30 minutes a day to go download Excel spreadsheet. It’s like, tell me what to do for these three things. So that’s what we built it for. We’re trying to help the average person that wasn’t exposed to things like you and I were, and one little nudge in the right direction has an exponential outcome for their health and wellness.
Brett Bartholomew 56:14
I love that that’s super helpful in terms of how you describe that. I appreciate that. Can I ask this if you and I know it’s impossible to know this going back, but let’s say you were utilizing your own service back when you had that panic attack, and you were looking at that data, and maybe you did okay. So what would that have looked like . Okay, so what would that have looked like? What do you think you would have seen in your own data? Like, what was supremely out of balance? Was it just everything. Just humor me. Yeah, what would that have looked like?
Dr. Erik Korem 56:43
So you’ll find this interesting. There’s a dissident, there’s there’s a conflict. You wear your aura ring or whatever, and the aura says you feel like a 90% and you’re like, No, I don’t I feel like crap today. So what we do is we combine objective and subjective measures how you feel into very unique algorithms that we developed. And then it does, it’s not like, Hey, you can’t do this today. It just says, like, Hey, your adaptive capacity is a little bit lower. So here’s where to invest.
What I would have seen is, is like, on the mind section, I would have seen some things that were trending down, as far as like, my mood, because my mood was starting to tank off, my energy, and then my stress was going up and Aim7, and we’re like, hey, you need to invest and probably for me, it would have been mindfulness and then, honestly, some gratitude, because instead of thinking about, like, All this is going wrong, like, cognitively restructuring to like what’s going right.
And I had never really done gratitude until we put that into the app. And there’s a process of actually doing this. It takes only five minutes where you actually try to remember the thing and then experience the emotion that was evolved in that and almost indefinitely, or almost every single time, my gratitude goes back to my family and moments of like, where I was hugging my kid, and it literally changes your brain.
And so now, like when things are sucking, I’ve learned to have this practice of gratitude and be like, Wait a second. I had that moment last night with my son, he was sitting in my lap. Things are pretty good, or I had that great connection with Greg on my team today where we talked about that, and I literally started doing this in my own head.
So I would have followed my own logic of things that I built up, but because I’ve helped build this system, and as a byproduct, what we did was, is we found that it was just really interesting paper that showed the failures of wearable tech, that they do not change long term behavior. Really interesting. What you need is dynamic goal setting, real time, feedback, dynamic education.
Brett Bartholomew 58:54
A lot of dynamics. Can you break that down? People love to make these terms. It’s just like,
Dr. Erik Korem 59:00
Yeah, yeah. Goal setting that shifts with where they are. That’s like, Hey, you’re in this area. It’s changing based off of life circumstances. Number two is real time feedback. Hey, I actually did the thing. Hey, freaking great job, man. Yeah. Like, and then the third thing is, it’s like, now that instead of just telling you to go sleep seven hours? Well, how do you create those conditions? So we built this library in there. I went out and started getting some of the best that I knew in these different fields, like Dr Peter habrow, Senior sports psych for the US Olympics.
I got Alex Auerbach from the Toronto Raptors, and those people to come and start talking about these things in little vignettes. And guess what? I’m digesting all of this information, and I’m like, holy crap, I didn’t have the conversation in my head under control. And so as I was benefiting from all of this stuff. So yeah, like, people can go, I want to learn about how to psychological flexibility, and go watch a two minute video, and then it ties back to the recommendation we make.
So the whole thing was built. For busy people. So if I now have a different perspective on my athletes too, because everything rests on them, right? Like, there’s some you got to have some compassion for these pro athletes. Like, if they don’t go out and do a great job on Sunday, they could be gone, because we all know that bottom part of the roster churns, and there’s a lot of things that are pulling at them.
And so when we would come back and try to add something extra on their plate, they’re like, Man, I don’t need that. I really don’t need that. And so it just gave me a whole different perspective on things like actually being in the fight myself, or I don’t have a guaranteed paycheck. I got to go out and make it happen. Life sucks. Sometimes I got all these things pulling at me. What are the little bitty behaviors I can engage in to keep the ball moving forward? It was just a whole freaking paradigm shift. And if I would, I wish I would have had that 10 years ago, and I wouldn’t have been asking athletes to do so much
Brett Bartholomew 1:00:57
For sure. Yeah, no, I think that’s a good point, and especially your point about wearables. I mean, I know I used to wear an aura ring. I quit wearing it quite a while ago, just because, you know, that was something I wake up. Okay, great. Here’s my score. You’re going to tell me that I’m crap at just about everything, or even if I was getting way better than average sleep, it was like, Well, you didn’t get enough REM sleep, and now you didn’t get enough deep sleep, and you got a ton of,I just don’t tell you, yeah, I just, like, I don’t, after a while, like, think about that, right?
You and I are in tune with this many people that come from sports performance, fitness, well, like, but the average person, nobody needs to be told, like, it’s a living up to this impossible standard based on a wide variety of metrics. I think the thing that one wearable out there, I like to a good bit, and it’s unfortunate. Andy jazzy chose to discontinue it, along with a lot of their health type stuff. Was I lied to the halo band because we used the tone quite a bit, and that helped me with me and my wife when we were having conversations, when I would perceive her as dismissive or passive aggressive, and it would kind of give insight as to where she maybe was expressing something else.
I might seem like I’m coming across as really assertive, when in reality, it could have been sadness. I think anything that lends insight into a lot of these pillars that you’re speaking to in a relatable way, a way that doesn’t encroach, a way that doesn’t suffocate, a way that doesn’t preach, is only going to be more and more and more important, and it’s going to be fascinating to see how these things continue to adapt.
Because nobody wants to just be felt. They want to be held accountable, but they don’t want to be talked to as like, less than you know, nobody’s going to have a percentage. This idea that we’ve got to live up to a percentage and a score, as opposed to like you’re mentioning, hey, just a quick note here. And try this one thing. Let’s keep iterating on it. If I’m understanding that’s kind of the tone you guys use,
Dr. Erik Korem 1:02:49
It’s really like you have to dig in our app for the data analytics. We try to keep it as low as deep in the app as possible. It’s literally like we push you a notification in the morning to fill out what we call a calibration, and it gives you a set this was a surprise finding, because almost everybody that used our app is a busy parent, and what they really appreciated was taking 30 seconds to actually assess how they feel.
Most people don’t do that, like how what’s my mood like today? And then it’s like, okay, based off of this, here’s one little action you can take today, and then in the evening, we send them another thing. It’s called a wrap up. We text them, and it’s like, now they get to decompress their day. It’sa mental health check in, and what happened? Like, we need like, part of you know this in what you do, part of the process of progress is reflection, but most of us never take time to reflect on what actually happened today or the good things that happen.
And so that’s another little pause we give people. It’s less about like, you gotta be perfect on this, this and this. It’s more like, Hey, you’re a real person. One of our core values is individuality. Want to meet people where they are, to bring them to where they want to be, yeah? And so yeah, I’m with you. Like all of this stuff can be used for good or it can create fear and paranoia, yeah. And that is not what you want.
Brett Bartholomew 1:04:13
Oh, that’s smart. Well, listen, Eric, I appreciate you coming on here and giving this information in a personal, practical way. I think that, as I said earlier, I’ll be repetitive for a reason. Anything that can help people just draw more attention to little things that they can do in a non preachy way, things that kind of just say, Hey, you might be feeling this. You might be feeling that we understand that you’ve got a busy lifestyle. Let us meet you in the middle. Is incredibly valuable. You’ve given us a ton of information. Please tell our audience where they can go to support you, where they can go to learn more, all of those things. What can we do to give back to you?
Dr. Erik Korem 1:04:48
Yeah, I really appreciate that you can follow me on any of the social media platforms. @EricKorem, I have a newsletter called adaptation. I send out every Friday. I would point. People to that, and I’ll give you a link for that, and then obviously, Aim7. That’s what we do. Now, you know, we have a waiting list of about 3000 people. And if you’ve listened to this on the show, and you think this is interesting to you, if you put in the in the in the form, you literally have to apply that you heard me on the show, then we’ll move you right up to the top for our next cohort, but I just really appreciate the opportunity to come on and share my story. And it’s messy, it’s crazy, it’s probably like a lot of people. It doesn’t make sense sometimes, but that’s life, and I really appreciate the work you’re doing. Brett, so thank you so much
Brett Bartholomew 1:05:35
Likewise, and everybody, please make sure check all these things in the show notes. Support our guests. They’re more than happy to come and give you their time and their expertise and their lessons and learnings. So please support them. Support this show. If you could leave a rating, tell this. Tell your friends about it. We’d really appreciate it. For myself, Dr Eric Korem and the rest of the Art of Coaching, family, we’ll See you Next time
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