Exercise Psychology @ExercisePSY

🏙️ Heading to Chicago for #SBM2026? The Motivation Lab is out in full force! Stop by to say hi & see what my team, collaborators, and neighbors in & near @UMKines have been up to. 📽️ Check the "SBM Playbook" below for our schedule and crowd-sourced Survival Guide! 🧵 (1/2)

3.3 and 2.8 and 2.7 and 2.6 earthquake foreshocks hit warning area - ALERT ! - Major earthquake is likely in the Los Angeles area today. 04/04/2026.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

Elon Musk just explained why the best engineers on Earth will never take your call. Three reasons. Most companies fail all three. Elon Musk: “State what’s the mission, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve? And just be clearly willing to pour a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it.” The top one percent of talent does not care about your office. Your perks. Your free lunches. Your branded hoodie. They care about one thing. Does this matter. If the answer takes more than one sentence to explain, they are already gone. Musk broke motivation into three layers. The first is the work itself. Musk: “Somebody’s got to look forward to coming to work in the morning. Are they enjoying the work itself intrinsically?” Not the paycheck. Not the title. The work. Solving problems most people cannot even frame correctly. Alongside people who make you sharper just by being in the room. If Monday morning feels like a sentence, no salary commutes it. The best people leave. Not eventually. Within months. The second is money. Musk: “They also feel like they will receive fair financial compensation. Like that the financial rewards are good and fair.” Not charity. Not below-market equity with a four-year cliff. Fair. One word. Most companies still get it wrong. The engineer who knows exactly what they generate does not negotiate. They compare. When the gap gets wide enough, they vanish. No conversation. No counteroffer window. Two-week notice on a Friday afternoon. You do not cap the ceiling of someone producing at that level. You match it. Or you fill the desk again in six months. The third is the one that separates real companies from forgettable ones. Musk: “For the best people in the world, they’ll want to know: is what they’re doing going to matter? If they spend 10 years doing this, will it make a difference to the world?” Ten years. The best engineers on the planet are running a calculation no recruiter has a spreadsheet for. If I give this company a decade of my life, does the world look different because I did? If the answer is no, they are not coming. No signing bonus changes that. No recruiter pitch rewrites it. No equity package papers over it. The mission has to be real. And the person at the top has to be visibly bleeding for it. Musk: “Be clearly willing to pour blood, sweat, and tears into it.” Talent watches the founder before they read the offer letter. If the person running the company is coasting, optimizing for exits, playing it safe, the best people sense it before the first interview ends. They do not want a manager. They want someone who has bet everything and would do it again tomorrow. Most companies post a job. The ones that land the best people alive offer something no job listing can contain. The work has to be the reward. The money has to be fair. The mission has to be worth a decade of someone’s only life. Miss one and the person you needed most never even opened your email.

“There’s something about an athlete that you have to believe that you’re better than you are. You have to. But, the great ones can also look really honestly with themselves and go you know what? I’m afraid. I need to get better at this. I need to get better at that,” Dave Roberts

This lady tells 1 year of studying quantum physics in under 60 seconds: Quantum physics isn't just science; it's logical spirituality. You don't attract what you want; you align with what you already are. In the quantum field, every version of you already exists, the wealthy you, the happy you, the successful you. Your thoughts and emotions broadcast a frequency that your life mirrors back to you. The quantum field responds to certainty, not begging. Visualization is your most powerful tool because our minds can't distinguish between imagination and reality. Pull your future into the now and recode your past. Everything is accessible right now. You aren't just a person in the universe; you are the universe experiencing itself through you. Go live like the miracle you are!

We need more coaches like Rick Pitino!

"What's the biggest difference between the athletes who WIN vs the ones that don't?" Answer: They have a WINNING story running in their head, all the time - Too good not to share, sending to all my hitters (repeatedly)

Good explanation of nihilist philosophy

Pete Carroll on Coaching 🎥 Great coaches don’t just demand compliance. They teach athletes to think, adapt, and figure it out. Coaching = Belief in someone’s potential + Commitment to their journey.

This #SelfDeterminationTheory meta-analysis synthesizes findings across studies to show how psychological need support & satisfaction relate to employee motivation, well-being, & workplace outcomes. 🔗 ow.ly/M9hZ50YpLfj

Team USA just won its first Olympic hockey gold in 46 years. On February 22. The exact anniversary of the Miracle on Ice. Forget the storybook narrative for a second. What happened today is a masterclass in what performance science teaches us about pressure, identity, and legacy. Consider the pressure this team was under. They walked into today carrying 46 years of near misses. The US hadn't won Olympic gold since 1980. They lost the gold medal game in 2002 and 2010...both times to Canada. Last year at the 4 Nations tournament, Canada beat them in overtime. That loss was still raw. The 1980 hero, Mike Eruzione, was in the building. He told the players before the game: "It's just a hockey game." It wasn't. And everyone knew it. Canada outshot the US 41-26. They dominated the second and third periods. Nathan MacKinnon missed an open net. Macklin Celebrini had a breakaway and couldn't convert. Devon Toews had Hellebuyck beaten and somehow the puck stayed out. Then Charlie McAvoy cleared a puck off the goal line with his glove. This was not a dominant performance. It was a team surviving enormous pressure and refusing to break. That distinction matters. How does a team perform under that kind of weight? It starts with the environment the coach creates. Mike Sullivan is now the only American-born coach to win multiple Stanley Cups AND Olympic gold. When he took over the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2015, the team was loaded with talent — Crosby, Malkin, Letang — and completely broken. His description: "There was a dark cloud over the locker room." His first move wasn't a new system or a motivational speech. It was a reframe. He told the team: "There are certain things in life we can control and certain things we can't. We needed to focus on the things that we could control and not dedicate any cognitive resources or worry to things we couldn't control." The team adopted a two-word motto: "Just play." Six months later, they won the Stanley Cup. Tonight, he helped USA do it again on the biggest stage in the world. Sullivan builds what he calls a "safe zone for learning." His video review sessions are explicitly NOT about blame. "We don't want a player walking into our video room on eggshells worried about 'Am I going to be in the film? Is Coach going to yell at me?' It's a game of mistakes. Our responsibility is to learn from them." His guiding principle from his college coach: "Before players want to know what you know, they want to know that you care." It's the difference between compliance and buy-in. Buy-in wins championships. Research backs up Sullivan. Fear-based environments don't produce peak performance. Especially when pressure is already high... They produce anxiety, risk-aversion, and choking. When people feel psychologically safe — when they know mistakes won't be weaponized against them — they take smarter risks, recover faster from errors, and perform better under pressure. We could see it in how Sullivan framed this moment in the weeks before the game. "What an incredible opportunity we have in front of us." Not a burden or expectation...Opportunity. He took the unusual step for a hockey team and kept the team in the Olympic Village instead of a hotel. His reasoning: "The Village is part of the experience." The Hughes brothers roomed together. The Tkachuk brothers roomed together. He didn't try to ignore or isolate them from the pressure. He was embedding them in it, together. And then there's the guy who scored the goal. Jack Hughes came into the Olympics injured, underperforming, slotted on the fourth line. Sullivan moved him up mid-tournament because, as he put it, "We thought by moving him and getting him more ice time, he could impact the game more." Hughes's response: "I believe in myself more than anyone. Wherever I was slotted coming into this thing, I knew I was going to play well." A coach who believed in him when results said otherwise. A player who believed in himself when the lineup said otherwise. Then two teeth got cracked in half by a high stick in the third period. And he scored the golden goal anyway. Everyone's going to remember this as the night the US ended a 46-year drought. On the anniversary. In overtime. Against Canada. But the real lesson is quieter than that. The environment you create determines the performance you get. A safe zone for learning. A focus on controllables. Relationships built on care, not fear. Pressure reframed as opportunity. That's what it looks like when a team is ready, with the right environment and support to tackle the ghosts of history. They built a culture where a team could survive 41 shots and a kid with two broken teeth could score the biggest goal of his life. The 1980 Miracle was about belief overcoming talent. Today was different. Today was talent, preparation, identity, and 46 years of accumulated hunger arriving at the same moment. -Steve

Kids don’t want things to be easier. They want structure, clear routines, clear expectations, and consistent follow-through. But, structure without relationship is just control. High standards only work when we pair them with high support. Demand more. Teach more. Care more.

Honoring the Life and Legacy of #EdwardDeci. CSDT invites friends, family, and the SDT community to gather in remembrance of Edward L. Deci on Saturday, March 14, 2026. Please see the link for details and opportunities to share. mailchi.mp/selfdeterminat…

A sports specialization study at UCLA found that 88% of NCAA Division I athletes played an average of two to three sports growing up. I spoke with a Sioux Falls athlete and trainer who have seen the direct impacts of the multi-sport experience.

Five ways to strengthen your mind: 1. Improve your attitude and self-talk. 2. Push yourself through difficult challenges. 3. Practice mental exercises such as meditation and visualization. 4. Educate yourself and read books. 5. Get help from a mental coach.

5 of the Best Psychology Books: 1. Blink (Malcolm Gladwell) 2. Grit (Angela Duckworth) 3. Influence (Robert Cialdini) 4. Atomic Habits (James Clear) 5. Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) Read them all. You'll never look at human nature the same way.

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the only book on performance psychology you need. Every other book about 'the zone' or 'peak states' is just repackaging this. 30 years of research. 10,000+ interviews. Here are 10 best quotes:

4 books on the psychology of procrastination: 1) The Now Habit by Neil Fiore

I rarely recommend books…but if you work in fitness, human performance, or sport, The Sports Gene is non-negotiable I first read it ~12 years ago while working at Oregon, and it completely shifted how I viewed athletic development It forced me to think more critically about how genetics, environment, training, and physiology interact (something most people in these fields STILL don’t fully understand) If you coach athletes, train people, or if you’re serious about understanding human performance this will fill in gaps you didn’t even know you had Good books are like appreciate assets….they just get better with time and you pickup/identify something new each time you reread it

A few books that I credit to helping me when mental health falters: 1: Atomic Habits (James Clear) 2: Can't Hurt Me (Goggins) 3: The Daily Stoic (Holiday) 4: Driven (Douglas Brackmann) 5: GRIT (Angela Duckworth) If I could buy these for everyone I would.