What's one early story, one early story of a tennis player that changed your understanding, Dr. Loehr, of how to coach the mind?

Well, it, it actually was a very gradual progression.

And every single person I work with, I feel like is a living laboratory for me to understand a little bit more about how the mind and body work.

This is an integrated system, and if you tweak one end of the system, it actually reverberates throughout.

So even the look on your face as a competitor, the, the way in which you look, whether you feel like you're, uh, enjoying yourself or this is a, this is a horrendous thing that I'm involved in.

There's, it's a life and death struggle.

The way you walk, the way you carry yourself, what you had for breakfast, uh, how, what's your blood sugar level, what, uh, what kind of, uh, um, environment have you been in in the school situation, and how much pressure are you feeling in other parts of your life? I began to realize all of this connects to how you're performing at this moment, being able to focus in the moment, moment to moment in a match situation.

I need to take a break for my mental health, kind of do a reset." What do you hope tennis learns about mental health in the next decade?

We were talking about Mexico and the cartels and what's going on down there and dehumanization of the other.

Yeah, so it's so interesting that we have to, the brain has to make a differentiation between who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

If you're part of your family, you protect them.

We have extraordinary benevolence toward those that are like us, that look like us, speak like us, have rituals like us.

And then we have chilling malevolence.

toward those who might threaten us in some way, threaten the viability of our people.

And it could be for territory, it could be for resources, it could be for revenge, it could be for a number of things, but there are no limits to what you might go to to eliminate the adversary.

And why don't you just go from that and tell us more about the solution?

Is that correct?

You know, it's an interesting thing, Tom.

As a psychologist, I was never trained to think that character would be a really, really important part of the formula that I was looking into.

We're interested in performance.

How do you get from character... to human performance.

That was a finding that came to us quite by accident.

We began to realize that something was going on with people that had sustained success, that you can be a flash in the pan, you can cut corners and take shortcuts, and maybe because of some extraordinary talent that you have, you might be able to rise very quickly to the top.

Let's talk briefly about the personal credo and what that's about and the importance of journaling.

Well, what exactly did you find that made that disturbed you?

Well, the thing that bothered me was that, you know, I began to realize there's a person inside of all this.

And that person, we began to explore what are the things that actually enable that human being to feel like somebody more than just a tennis player who's defined by their rankings and by their achievement.

And so I started looking at the whole person, their physical health, their emotional health, their mental health, and their character health, and try to figure out how do we build an environment that actually addresses not just their achievement in tennis, but the whole person.

And that began a whole journey for me to try to find new and creative ways to do that.

And what we found was that the more you're helping people get healthier in all dimensions, the mentally tougher they were in their matches.

They weren't likely to get nervous or choke as much because they weren't defining themselves by the win-loss record or if they lose to this person that is so inferior to them.

But I want to ask you, who helped you understand your own emotional and mental life? Was there someone who gave you, Jim Lehrer, permission to, I guess, to be human, to be who you are?

But before we get started, can you tell us about your background?

Yeah, you know, I started out, my master's and doctorate were in psychology and really specializing in community mental health.

And I became a licensed psychologist in the state of Colorado.

And then when I was quite young, I was offered a fairly large job the executive director and chief psychologist of the San Luis Valley Comprehensive Community Mental Health Center that served the whole central in southern part of Colorado.

We covered an 8,600 square mile area, nine offices, multimillion dollar operation.

And I, yeah, that's what I was trained to do.

That's what I thought I would do for the rest of my life.

Can you talk about what the key elements of this program are?