Mattering is the experience of adding value and feeling valued, both to the self and interpersonally. It’s the feeling of being seen, heard, valued, and needed. It’s a psychological need and a human instinct, but is rarely discussed in performance contexts.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Chris Case: Hey everyone. Welcome to Fast Talk, your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host, Chris Case here with Trevor Connor and Grant Hokey. Why do you race? What does competition mean to you, and more importantly, how does it benefit you and the people around you? Today we’re venturing into the realm of positive psychology.
That branch of psychology devoted to the study of what is going right in a person and how to use those insights and tools to help people not only cope but thrive. More specifically today we delve into a discussion of mattering, which is the experience of adding value and feeling valued both to the self and interpersonally in our relationships.
It’s the feeling of being seen, heard, valued, needed. It’s a psychological need and a human instinct, but it is rarely discussed in performance contexts. Today we change that psychologist and former professional cyclist, Sonya Looney joins us to explain how cultivating these feelings of mattering can heighten our experience as athletes and lead to better success.
When an athlete has a sense that they matter, that they belong, that their words and emotions are being listened to rather than disregarded, it improves a host of attributes, drives better outcomes and leads to more joy, fulfillment, and success and a sense of accomplishment might be what matters most, regardless of the results.
Let’s make you feel like you matter, ’cause you do, and let’s make you fast. Well, Sonya Looney, welcome back to Fast Talk. It’s been a while.
[00:01:31] Sonya Looney: I’m so excited to be back again. This is one of my favorite podcasts.
[00:01:34] Trevor Connor: Oh,
[00:01:34] Chris Case: thank you.
[00:01:35] Trevor Connor: I really appreciate that. And the last time we had you on the show, you were in the middle of doing your master’s in Positive Psychology.
So I have to ask you, how did that go? What did you get out of it?
[00:01:46] Sonya Looney: Oh my gosh. What I got out of it was a new incredible community of people who are like-minded from all over the world. And the biggest thing that I learned is what we’re talking about today, mattering, which we can talk about in a second.
But another thing I learned is that there’s lots of times that we’re on the fence about things that we wanna do that are maybe investing in ourself or in our skill sets. And sometimes it costs money or time, and we. Might not go for it, but doing that changes your momentum so much and it just makes such a difference in your life.
So I think that if you’re on the fence about something like that, you should go for it.
[00:02:22] Chris Case: Nice. Well, Sonya, if you wouldn’t mind, let’s dive into that subject of mattering. If you could define some terms for us, what does that actually mean? I know there’s mattering, there’s anti-matter. What do those specific terms mean?
[00:02:36] Sonya Looney: I’m gonna go back one step for people in case they don’t know what positive psychology is, and then I will go into mattering. So a lot of times people think positive psychology is just about having good feelings or good vibes only, or ignoring all the hardships in life, and that is not what it’s about.
Positive psychology is about. The scientific study of what makes life good, of the things that help us and make us thrive in life. And that does not mean that we ignore all the hard things, but it’s how do we grow the good things in our life? And that’s a strengths-based approach instead of a deficit-based approach.
So that’s kind of a sweeping definition.
[00:03:12] Trevor Connor: It’s gonna say something I really like about it, and it’s pretty amazing. You studied under basically the inventor of positive psychology. Remind me his name.
[00:03:20] Sonya Looney: His name is Marty Seligman. And the history is that he was a president of the A PA in the late nineties.
And he said, why does psychology need to only be about misery, about fixing things that are broken and getting us to zero? What about the things that get us from zero to flourishing and doing really well in our lives? And so that’s how the field was born.
[00:03:39] Trevor Connor: Which is exactly where I was gonna go, which is psychology at the time was so focused on conditions and addressing conditions.
He flipped it around and said Psychology should also be about helping people function optimally. Which I think is a great message. And as you said, it’s not about just feeling good and being positive all the time. It takes work and it can be about overcoming challenges.
[00:04:00] Sonya Looney: And a lot of times things don’t feel good.
Like things that are meaningful in our lives are not often things that feel good in the moment, but meaning is part of positive psychology.
[00:04:09] Chris Case: Yes. And for more on positive psychology, you recorded an episode on that very subject, episode 2 87, so if people wanna go back and listen to that as a precursor to this conversation, they can do that.
Mm-hmm. How about mattering now in the context of positive psychology?
[00:04:26] Sonya Looney: Yeah, so I was so excited to learn about this. We had a lecture from Isaac Polski, and if this conversation intrigues you, he has a book called How People Matter and Mattering is the experience of adding value and feeling valued. It is the experience of feeling like we are seen, that people are invested in us, that people hear us, and that we are important.
And mattering is not something that exists in just one domain, so you can’t experience mattering if you only matter to yourself, and we can go into detail of what each of those constructs are. You also can experience mattering if it’s only to other people. It’s an interrelated experience. And how that relates to our wellbeing is that social connection and relationships.
The number one most important thing for our wellbeing and also our psychological needs. If the people out there, if they wanna look up self-determination theory, we have basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And whenever you are engaging in things that matter, that helps you feel like you matter.
It also meets your psychological needs.
[00:05:30] Chris Case: And the opposite of that, we were emailing back and forth about this subject and you specifically wrote anti-matter on there. What does that mean?
[00:05:39] Sonya Looney: So, yeah, anti-matter. I always like to include the researcher if I can remember them, because I think it’s important to attribute credit where it’s due so people can dig deeper.
Anti-matter was coined by Gordon Flat, and he’s actually a perfectionism researcher as well, which was what my master’s thesis was in, in perfectionism and accomplishment. Anti-matter is this experience of feeling invisible, feeling unseen. Feeling unheard and people that feel that way tend to feel depressed.
There’s kind of two different things that happen. You either feel invisible and depressed or you lash out and you go the opposite way. So think about people that don’t feel like they matter. They will join a gang or a cult, or things like that. Those experiences show up in two different ways, invisibility or lashing out.
[00:06:23] Trevor Connor: I have a question that I’m gonna throw at you and actually at Grant, because Grant you’ve said a couple times on the show talked about yourself racing the 40 plus race and basically said you have to understand when you’re racing the 40 plus race, the only person who cares is you and your spouse.
Nobody else cares,
[00:06:43] Chris Case: maybe not even spouse. So
[00:06:44] Trevor Connor: my question in this context of mattering is that telling the athlete, you don’t matter. And how do you still feel like you matter when you go? Nobody cares about this race.
[00:06:54] Grant Holicky: Okay, so I think we may have taken that a little too far, but I think your effort is relevant not just to you, but to the greater world.
I mean, this is the same thing of looking at your job or your profession or whatever it is that you’re doing. It’s a nebulous thought, but there’s a greater output of hard work in energy and commitment. That applies. I definitely went through this in my coaching when I’ve shifted from swim coaching where I was working with 17, 16, 18, 19 year olds, high school kids and helping them kind of grow as individuals and maybe work towards adulthood.
Then worried when I quit swim coaching. When I started coaching, cycling, that all I was doing was helping a bunch of 40 plus people feed their egos. But there’s more to it than that because what you learn on the bike or what you learn through training or what you learn through sport can then be applied to the rest of your world and the rest of your life, and that therefore expands the mattering beyond maybe your spouse.
I know for me, now that I have kids, what I do when I race, when they watch is really important to them. Not whether I win or lose, but it’s important to them of how hard I work and how hard I try and what my commitment is and how quickly I give up or any of those pieces of the puzzle.
So maybe just a little bit more nuance to that statement than just nobody loves you but your mother.
[00:08:15] Sonya Looney: I’m gonna jump in here and talk about the context that we just mentioned of I’m trying to matter through my racing. So there’s lots of different ways that people are trying to matter, and my thesis is that people are trying to matter through their goals and accomplishments. But whenever you are racing, it’s not just about the win.
It’s not just about how well you’re doing, it’s about the perceived support piece. Like feeling valued is about self-acceptance and self-compassion, but it’s also about. Feeling celebrated. Feeling like you belong, feeling respected, feeling like there are people that see you as a whole person. So whenever you’re racing, if you’re only looking at how well you’re doing, then you are missing out on the reflection on what it truly actually means to feel significant in the world.
And racing helps you add value to yourself for sure, because adding value to yourself has to do with believing in your capability and taking action on that and being motivated. But it also is more than that. It’s about how you’re also adding value to the people around you. So like if you’re road racing, you’re adding value to your teammates.
If you’re a solo athlete, like me doing mountain biking, you’re still impacting the people around you with your energy and the people who are gonna hear about your races. So it’s about so much more than that. And I think that in performance context, we reduce our sense of mattering to how well we are doing to our performance, and that creates anti-matter.
[00:09:38] Grant Holicky: Hmm. Yeah, I think that’s a very fair point. And you brought up something in terms of community that is really, really relevant when we talk about racing. And Trevor, I’ve also leaned into this a lot that. One of the things that I do to reframe my anxiety or nervousness about performance is think about the people that I get to race with that community and those groups and that enjoyment and those relationships have formed through a number of years and with people that I don’t see any other time other than on the race course.
But it’s something that brings me joy. I hope it brings them joy. To raise together. And that allows me to reframe. That allows me to go to a process based, an achievement based, an effort based mindset when I’m racing. And that expands to everything that I do.
[00:10:22] Sonya Looney: And also, like with the self-worth piece, like we’re talking about, I get anxious.
People get anxious because their self-worth is attached to the results, and it’s hard not to do that whenever everybody’s looking at your results and judging you, or you feel like they’re judging you based on that. And our self-worth can be based on competition and approval from others or things like competence or appearance.
And those things lead to anti-matter. So whenever we are thinking about the things that we are doing in a more complex way. It helps us understand that we are worth more than just our performance.
[00:10:55] Trevor Connor: Yeah. I’ve worked with athletes at all levels and I’ve helped pro athletes or worked with them when they’ve gotten some big wins, but I will still say the race that I was the absolute most excited about was this woman in her forties who was working with, who had just started going on the group rides with us, and she was so.
Intimidated by riding in the group and thinking that she couldn’t hang on with anybody. She was just scared to go on her group rides and we built up her confidence and she went to a race, which is a little local Cat four race, and she got second place and was so excited and it wasn’t so much about the result.
You know, it’s again. This isn’t gonna be in, in cycling news or anything like that. It was, she went from this person who was scared to ride with other people who had no confidence in herself, defining that confidence and feeling that sense of accomplishment. And that’s why I’ve never been as excited about a result as I was when she called me up and told me about that.
[00:11:55] Sonya Looney: Trevor, whenever that person came to the group ride, she probably was worried that people wouldn’t like her or that she wasn’t worthy of being there because she wasn’t fast. Mm-hmm. But what you guys showed her is that she is seen and she’s worth paying attention to, which that’s the feeling of you matter, and so you’re environment.
Really impacts that. So if you’re in environments where people don’t treat you the same, if you are winning or not winning, if they’re treating you differently or paying attention to you differently, it makes it complicated. So in sport, people pay attention to us so much more when we are winning. I mean, how many times have you won a race and everybody’s like celebrating and you come second and people are like, eh.
Like it’s embedded in our culture, so it’s so important to be aware of this so that we know who we are savoring our accomplishments with.
[00:12:40] Grant Holicky: And when we coach on that and when we’re working with athletes on that, the real benefit of talking about the effort or the achievement or what they overcame regardless of the placement.
I had an athlete recently at Pan Ams who had a heartbreaking loss and ended up sucking at Pan Ams and you could see them be deflated. And then as we talked through all the things they did very well and all the things that they had done better than they’d ever done before, you watch that grow again.
And that inflation of the how they felt about themselves. And that’s just so crucial in sport and in how we deal with athletes. ’cause it is. It’s so easy to make sport binary, win and lose, and that’s where so much of this difficulty comes in is when we feel like we fail.
[00:13:26] Sonya Looney: I’ve been working very hard on distinguishing between achievement and accomplishment, and I’m also working on a journal article on this.
Achievement is like an objective outcome that you do. I mean, achievement goals are performance or mastery goal, so it could be about process, but when we think about it. People are talking about an objective outcome, but an accomplishment is so much more than an achievement. An achievement is a type of accomplishment.
So like you could have an accomplishment without actually achieving your goal. So I’ll give you an example. The Grand Traverse in Colorado, I did the summer reversion where it’s like 40 mile trail running one day, and then the next days a 40 mile mountain bike race. And I didn’t train enough for the running race.
So I bailed at mile 25 ’cause like I couldn’t walk anymore. I hit my hip Flexor is were done. So objectively I failed. But actually I have a great sense of accomplishment from that race for many different reasons. Or you can achieve your goal. You know, maybe your goal was to come second place or to become world champion or whatever.
You could achieve your goal and still feel nothing because you don’t have a sense of accomplishment. So what I try to encourage people is, is when you’re looking at your sense of accomplishment. Connect it to your sense of mattering and my thesis, a book I’m working on, everything that I’m working on is about how.
Feeling like we matter is what makes our accomplishments meaningful. So in the context of sport, ask yourself what is meaningful about my goal outcomes and my striving in sport? And try to zoom out past your power number or your results so that you can have more of a dynamic living, holistic view of what this thing that you’re actually doing is and how it contributes to yourself and to others.
[00:14:58] Chris Case: Before we dive more into that statement just there, I would like to sort of go back and have you dig into the science a little bit more of how mattering actually improves performance. If that is the case, what’s the science there?
[00:15:14] Sonya Looney: There’s a lot of different ways that you can take it, so I’m gonna pick the easiest one, and that’s whenever we feel like we matter.
We have a sense of connection to other people. And if you dive into the research on perceived social support. People who have perceived social support, which is not even the fact that people are physically there with you, but that people actually see me as a whole person, that I’m allowed to take risks that I’m seeing past just this thing that I’m doing.
It reinforces your person’s value as a whole person. And it increases resilience and it buffers against things like the stress response and how you’re appraising yourself. It increases confidence, it increases your self-regulation, and whenever you feel like you matter to others, that you feel valued to others.
You also are more comfortable taking risks, so that makes you more resilient because you have this social support piece, which is often overlooked in resilience. So there’s a bunch of interconnected pieces that come from this, and also from performance, whenever you feel like you matter to yourself, both adding value and feeling valued.
Adding value is that belief in my ability, my intrinsic motivation and understanding where that comes from and feeling valued that I accept myself and I have compassion for myself whenever I do fail. Like that helps you perform better as well. So whenever you can break it down, thinking about it almost in this structured way, it helps you realize that, okay, like it’s all right for me to go out there and give it my all, or to go for this thing that I’ve never done before or sign up for this.
40 mile trail running race that I’m probably gonna fail at and I’m gonna be all right and my self-worth is not gonna be contingent upon what happens.
[00:16:51] Grant Holicky: I think this is really relevant in individual sports too, and one of the things that we run into repeatedly in these I sports cycling can be one of those, especially if we’re off road swimming.
Always felt that way. How do you bring this team component, the we component into I Sports? There’s a great paper, and I really wish I could remember who wrote it, but putting the we in individual sports, putting the we in I sports, because that social support, the athlete gets seen as a person exactly like you’re saying.
And everything becomes easier in terms of accomplishment, achievement, everything that they’re doing, how they strive, how they risk take. And again, I’ve mentioned this before, I think risk taking is maybe one of the most important things we can learn as a young athlete. And it’s one of the things that is beaten out of young athletes in a lot of ways because they’re afraid of failure.
And when you have that support, when people around you are gonna love you, no matter what you do, it gets a whole lot easier to try to take risk and see what happens.
[00:17:49] Sonya Looney: Yeah. In a study with Olympic athletes, they were looking at all these different things that contributed to their success. And in that research study there was a bunch of Venn diagrams at the center was relationships.
It did talk about this perceived support piece. Part of it was that people were seen beyond the tactical and also it talked about the coaching relationship. So in individual sports, a lot of athletes still have an athletic coach, like a cycling coach or a tactical coach or whatever. But whenever that tactical coach gave them feedback or when they would talk about more than just tactics, they would feel seen more as a person and more like they belonged.
So I think that’s another way we can add the we in I sports. Is in the coaching relationship. In that paper, they also talked about relationship with like your massage therapist or like all of these other people, your parents, where you’re seen beyond just being an athlete because it’s so easy for our identity to foreclose on just being an athlete if that’s how everybody else sees us.
But whenever it’s reflected that we are all of these other things, there’s a lot of complexity in who we are. It helps us feel valued in different ways.
[00:18:50] Trevor Connor: I find this interesting ’cause we actually just recently did an episode on the role of parents with young athletes, and one of the messages with the expert we had on that show was the worst thing a parent can do is after an event or after a race, go up to their child and basically hit them with a well, did you win question?
[00:19:11] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:12] Trevor Connor: Because that’s communicating to the child, putting it in the context of this episode. You only matter if you win. And I found it very interesting. We had a couple quotes in there, as I remember from Elite athletes and we said, what was it like with your parents? And they said that their parents just really only were supportive, just wanted to see them be happy.
Which, you know, I think would surprise a lot of people who want to drive their kids. And you know, it’s win or lose and if you lose, you’re a loser. But I like what you are saying and this context of they need to know that they matter no matter what.
[00:19:46] Grant Holicky: The other thing that she said was a killer was when a kid finished the race and they didn’t do the way they wanted to do.
A parent coming up and saying, oh, it’s not a big deal. It’s just sport. It doesn’t matter. And that was the direct quote. It doesn’t matter, but when you have an athlete that cares so much about this sport. That is really relevant. It does really matter. So putting your arm around a kid going, yeah, man, that hurts.
That wasn’t the way you wanted it to go and I hurt with you and that’s not what we want, but we’re gonna move forward and we’re gonna find a way to improve from this and we’re gonna learn from it and we’re gonna do everything going forward. That’s really important as well. So it’s not just how do we push them to win or lose, but also.
How do we see the relevance of this sport to them and for them, and how can we move forward with that?
[00:20:35] Sonya Looney: Yeah. What you’re talking about here is how we are helping people feel heard. So after somebody finishes their race, what are you doing to help them feel heard? And feeling heard is such an important piece of feeling valued.
So how we give feedback, how we ask questions, how we listen. Like listening is a behavior. I don’t know if you guys have heard of active listening.
[00:20:56] Chris Case: Sure.
[00:20:57] Sonya Looney: It’s listening with like presence and intention with nonverbals and listening for what’s said underneath the words. And then. Being with the person and reflecting back what they said so that they feel like you see them.
And if we don’t do that, if we don’t acknowledge how people are feeling, trying to pick up on the underlying pieces of what’s going on for that person, they don’t feel as psychologically safe with us. They don’t feel like they’re, again, back to risk-taking or. Back to being able to say what’s truly on their mind.
It’s so important for athletes to have a space where they can actually say what they feel and not have somebody say, it’s okay, like you’ll do better next time, or whatever. To feel truly heard and that feeling heard piece is just so important.
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[00:22:00] Trevor Connor: So here’s the question that I have. So I always love, Dr. Seiler has said this a few times to us. If you do the math, you’re doing two high intensity interval sessions a week, which is over a hundred a year.
And if you have 20 years of racing and training, that means you’re doing thousands of high intensity interval trainings, which means if you have one bad workout, the truth of the matter is. It doesn’t matter, but how do you communicate to somebody that you care about? That workout didn’t matter, but you still matter.
How do you separate the two?
[00:22:33] Sonya Looney: Well, first of all, they are not the workout. So first you would acknowledge like, Hey, like I get that this is really frustrating, that this workout didn’t go the way that you planned and. I get how you might be thinking of what this could mean for you, but let’s take a second and zoom out a bit.
And then you start asking them questions to have. And so instead of you telling them how they feel or what it means, you try and get them to say what it means. Like in the past if you missed a workout or you know, didn’t hit your numbers, like what happened a week later or what happened in the next race?
Or what would you say to somebody else if this happened to them? To try to generate perspective. And we’re trying to affirm somebody’s intrinsic value as a person. So you remind them who they are. You’re the type of person that shows up. You’re the type of person that cares so much about these workouts and also remind them of their contribution beyond just the workout.
They’re contributing to other people in different ways that are beyond the workout. Whenever we’re experiencing negative emotions, our perspective actually narrows, like it physically narrows, but also our perspective narrows, and there’s something called the broaden and build theory of positive emotions.
So whenever you are experiencing more positive emotions, your perspective actually widens in the resources that you see available to you. You see more of them. So I’m not saying to try to make them feel positive, but if you can try to just create some distance from those thoughts and those feelings of the hard workout.
So that eventually they can experience positive emotions and see that there’s a bigger picture here that can really help them.
[00:24:00] Grant Holicky: I also think one of the things that you can do is go, Hey, so what else is going on in your life? Where are we right now? What’s the bigger picture? You know, we’re in a really hard block, and what that does is it does pull in the holistic view of that person to them.
They know they’re being seen more as just the machine that’s supposed to deliver these numbers. I think one of the things that is really relevant here too, is that when we talk to an athlete about maybe that bad workout that we’re acknowledging the rest of their life, what may be contributing to that workout.
Are we in the middle of a really hard block? Is there some things going on at home or at work? That are adding to a cognitive load of stress and a fatigue, then they’re seen more as a whole person. We’re talking about this holistic approach to their training. Instead of, you’re a machine, you’re supposed to hit these numbers, and that’s all that’s supposed to happen.
And one of the things you can ask as a coach is why do you think maybe this went that way? Why do you think you’re struggling? And again, that athlete is getting heard and now we’re creating a big picture that looks at it and goes, okay, here’s this set of events that put us in this place. What can we change in the future to maybe not have that workout that day?
Maybe I’m not even giving that workout when we’re in this situation. Or maybe how do we approach this workout with a more realistic set of goals of what we’re able to do when we’re in this spot? The broaden and building theory is fantastic, and I love when we studied that and I looked at that. I love that idea, that positivity is what allows us to branch out and allows us to grow and allows us to improve.
I think we, we hear that and we’re like, well, of course. As coaches and a lot of times we’re taught to harp on what’s wrong. We’re taught on picking apart that race, and I have an uncle passed away recently. He was a quadriplegic and he was a quadriplegic for 20 some years, 25 years, which is kind of unheard of, of lifespan.
I remember when I was in school for sports psychology, I talked to him about some of these things and one of the things I talked to him about was three good things. Sitting down on a regular basis and talking about three good things that are happening in your life, writing them down and why they’re happening.
And he said, I’ve been doing that for 15 years. That saved my life.
[00:26:10] Sonya Looney: Wow. That is amazing.
[00:26:11] Grant Holicky: Because one of the things you learn very quickly when you do three good things is that three good things aren’t happening in a vacuum. They’re happening because of some of the things that you do in your life to create the opportunity for those three good things, or it creates.
I’m getting into all of it, but then it also creates this feeling of gratitude towards some of those other people that allowed you to have those three good things, and gratitude is shown to improve everything that we do in our lives, especially when it’s vocalized or put down on paper.
[00:26:41] Chris Case: So I wanna interrupt a little bit here.
I’m talking to two people who have this sense of empathy. We’re talking a lot about empathy here, but you also have degrees in psychology. There’s so many coaches out there that this type of conversation. This type of wording of questions, it does not come naturally to them. In fact, the opposite comes naturally to them.
So what do you say to those coaches? How do they get better? Do they literally write down the questions that they should ask and have that with them at all times so that after a race, they don’t immediately go? Well, you didn’t win. So you know they have prompts. How do they improve at this?
[00:27:25] Sonya Looney: Well, if you wanna improve at something, you have to work at it, just like anything.
So, you know, I did coaching, training, uh, at Vanderbilt University in 2020. We worked in triads, a group of three to practice the language of coaching, to practice motivational interviewing, to practice active listening. I think that these skills should be a core competency or continuing education requirement for all coaches, and I think it should be taught in schools like this is just a life skill that makes your life so much better.
So, oh, an easy way to start implementing this is first start with what went well. Just ask the question, what went well. A second thing that you can do is when people are talking to you. Listen to what they’re saying. Do your best to listen to what they’re saying without thinking about what you need to say next to be right, or to teach them something and simply just reflect back what you heard them say.
And it’s gonna feel weird when you first start doing it ’cause they’re like, they’re gonna think I’m crazy. But when you just repeat back what somebody said to you, they feel heard and they, and then leave space, be quiet and they will continue talking and that will build rapport in the relationship.
There will be space for you to teach them things and to go back through all the things that went wrong as well. But you have to lead with that to build that relationship and to help them feel like they matter.
[00:28:38] Grant Holicky: Absolutely. And if they don’t have that relationship, they don’t have that comfort with you.
They’re not gonna share anything with you anyway. And they’re gonna be challenged to do that. But one of the things I would say to build on what. Sonya just said is that we have to practice on ourselves. If we’re gonna ask our athletes to go out and do three good things, and we’re gonna ask our athletes to talk about what’s good in their life, we have to, as a coach, do the same.
And I think one of the things that I throw out there that should be taught in coaching classes is how to model as a coach, the behavior and the reactions that you want your athletes to have. If you’re trying to get an athlete to eliminate their anxiety and nervousness, and you’re pacing around like you’re anxious and nervous.
It’s not gonna work. And one of the things that I always saw as a coach or as a teacher that I had to do early on is you’re putting on a show. Man, like I will have times before I leave the tent to go to a cyclo cross race or before I went on the pool deck as a swim coach, where I would sit in a quiet, dark room and get myself in character almost, what did I have to put away from my life a little bit so that I could go out there and be what they wanted and needed me to be as a coach.
But one thing I will throw out there that I think is really helpful for coaches. Is to visualize some of these conversations before you have these conversations and visualize the whole event going disastrously everything that could go wrong, goes wrong. Put myself in that position as a coach and now practice.
What I am going to say to that athlete and what environment I’m going to create, and I’ve done that in a lot of its settings and going into nationals and going into some of these world cups that we’re about to go do in Europe, and I have 12 junior athletes. I will sit in bed sometimes and visualize all, you know what?
Breaking loose. What my job is going to be now to help them move through this for their next World Cup or towards world championships.
[00:30:36] Sonya Looney: I love that you talked about mental imagery. ’cause like you do that as an athlete too. You’re supposed to like imagine all the different things in how you’re gonna cope.
I’ll give another practical piece of advice that could be helpful for coaches is use ai. Tell the AI. I’m trying to work on these different skills, come up with a scenario, you’re the athlete, and then critique me. Help me get better at this communication skill. And you can use it as a tool.
[00:30:57] Trevor Connor: So I wanna take Chris’s question just a little bit further and I’ll start by saying I have somebody very close to me who I will allow to remain nameless here, who really has this feeling that she does not matter.
It’s unfortunately something that has been drilled into her for a long time. And first I can tell you just saying, oh, you do matter. It doesn’t change your mindset. Mm-hmm. It is something that takes a long time to shift that belief and, and get that person to believe I actually do matter. The other thing I have noticed is one time just communicating to them that they don’t matter can undo 50 times telling them they do matter.
So Sadie, I wanna throw this to you. When you have somebody who just doesn’t feel they matter, they have that lack of confidence, that lack of belief in themselves. How do you change that? Because it can be very hard.
[00:31:49] Sonya Looney: Well, mattering and confidence are, I think, are two different things, but if somebody doesn’t feel like they are significant, they don’t feel like they’re recognized and they don’t feel like they rely on them, those are the three components of mattering.
Start showing that to them. Use your words instead of saying, you matter. Catch them doing something. Right. Tell ’em about the thing that they did. Tell ’em how it impacted you. Tell them why it mattered to you, and help them continue to do that. Ask them for their help so that they feel relied upon, that they feel needed and counted on.
Help create opportunities for them so they feel invested in. Notice what their character strengths and the things that are unique are so that they feel appreciated. So a lot of. Feeling valued, like a lot of people are working so hard to add value. In my research, it was about people are adding value through their accomplishments or their goals, or working really hard to add value, but they don’t feel valued because of these three things.
They don’t feel like people see how hard they’re working or the contributions they’re making. They don’t feel like people are relying on them and they feel like nothing they do matters. And this is the very important piece of mattering. Being an interpersonal, you know, between two people or more relationship.
That we need to see our value, not just to ourselves, but we need to feel that way with other people. So the people you surround yourself with and the environments you put yourself with can really make a huge difference in how you feel. So I would question like what is the environment that this person is in and how is that impacting her in a negative way?
And how can she be in an environment or around other people that can start reflecting that sense of significance in her so that she sees it in herself?
[00:33:24] Chris Case: These conversations that Grant and I have had on many podcast episodes and offline podcast episodes about this subject matter goes straight to the heart of parenting for me.
’cause I’m not a psychologist, but I am a parent and all these things. It’s irrelevant maybe to this conversation, but it just makes me think like if all parents out there could learn some of these behaviors and things, that the world would be a better place. It’s every relationship, right? Yeah. It’s
[00:33:50] Grant Holicky: not just parenting, it’s every relationship.
And so it’s valuable across the board. And with parenting, what gets hard is you spend so much time telling your kids what to do or telling them what they need to do better. Don’t do
[00:34:01] Sonya Looney: that. Don’t touch that.
[00:34:02] Grant Holicky: Right, right, right. Put that away.
[00:34:04] Sonya Looney: Mine are really little, so it’s like, get your pants on. Don’t
[00:34:07] Grant Holicky: get that outta your mouth.
Yeah, exactly. You know, whatever that is. Right. But we spend so much time dealing that. That it’s really hard to check ourselves and slow down and go, you know what? You did a really great job on that. Or, I love it when you do this, or, I love just being with you. And I think in everything that we do, this comes to the heart of the mattering conversation, creating a little space in our lives to slow down and you know, say out loud.
It comes back to gratefulness, it comes back to three good things. And to say out loud or think to ourselves, I want to do this. This is what I want people to see me as. This is how I want to interact with the world. This is what I wanna put out there in the world. So much of what struck me all the time when I looked at positive psychology and when I studied it, and especially Seligman’s work, is like there’s intention in this.
And when we put intention toward this. We can have such an influence on ourselves and in the world around us, but it takes a little intention,
[00:35:04] Sonya Looney: the noticing practice, like noticing and affirming. Zach Mercurio has a book called The Power of Mattering, and it’s for leaders, and he talks very specifically about this practice of noticing and affirming.
So important, and I wanna just give a resource for people. There’s a book called Gratitude Works by Bob Emmonds, and Bob Emmonds is the world’s leading researcher. He’s actually a friend of mine, so he’s gonna be so excited that we’re talking about this here. But yeah, I also recommend that book because there’s so many important things in there as well that he talks about.
Like gratitude is a whole separate podcast, but like. He talks about is like a sense of entitlement and how like sense of entitlement. You can’t experience gratitude when you have a sense of entitlement. So yeah, pick up the book. Gratitude works if you’re interested in gratitude because it’s so important.
So back to noticing, noticing what the people around you are doing and affirming those things. Whether you are a coach, whether you are an athlete on the race course, if you’re racing and there’s someone next to you, like crushing it instead of being like, uh, they’re taking what’s mine and they’re better than me, like.
Say something to them like, you’ll actually do better.
[00:36:06] Grant Holicky: You will. Yeah.
[00:36:06] Sonya Looney: People think I’m a bit crazy on the race course ’cause I have lots of energy and I’m like yelling and excited and like cheering for everyone around me and like yeah, like. But that helps me be better too. It’s not an altruistic thing, like it helps me be better.
So being able to notice around you, like it helps you
[00:36:20] Grant Holicky: a million times. I’ve done this in a cross race where I’ve come up on somebody. Every time Chris passes me, he’ll always say something to me and it, you know, it’s every time we race together, but just that simple statement. Again, comes back to what exactly what we were talking about at the very start of the episode of building community and kind of building this feeling of mattering that your racing isn’t just about you.
It can be about so much more, and it’s going to improve what you’re doing as an athlete a hundred percent, because it’s going to matter more to you if it feels like this. And we are social creatures. We depend on our relationships with others, and we’ve evolved to not be solitary. And so those interactions and the things that we do toward others and with others are monumental in our own wellbeing.
We have to continue to find space for that because we live in a world that can separate us from everybody all the time no matter what.
[00:37:11] Trevor Connor: Grant, I’m going to assume considering some of the things Chris says to me when he passes me that he was not saying things to affirm your self worth as he was passing you.
[00:37:22] Grant Holicky: No, but he knows the difference between us, right? He knows I race on joy. He knows you race on anger, so if he insults you, you get angry, you go faster. He says, joyous thinks to me and I go fast. There we go. He’s just a giver guys. He’s, Chris is just a giver in all aspects of racing. Thank you.
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[00:38:05] Trevor Connor: So let’s shift gears a little bit. Something I’m really interested in is what are some of the myths that people feel about mattering?
[00:38:14] Sonya Looney: Well, people are trying to make their mattering contingent upon things. So they say like, in order to matter, I, well, actually, how about what we put this on you guys?
Complete the sentence in order to matter, I have to
[00:38:29] Grant Holicky: make a difference. I mean, to me that would always be like, make a difference in somebody’s life, have a positive influence, those things.
Mm-hmm.
And I know how hard that is for me as a coach because if I’m in a place where I am. People aren’t coming back to me and saying, you’re making a difference, or this and that.
It’s a real struggle to feel personally
[00:38:48] Trevor Connor: as if I’m in that place.
[00:38:49] Grant Holicky: Mm-hmm.
[00:38:50] Trevor Connor: For me, it’s overcome challenges and I personally don’t matter that much if anybody notices or not.
[00:38:56] Sonya Looney: The biggest one for me is I have to be constantly productive. Hmm. I’ll share more that people have done because I, I do this workshop mattering and competitive sports, and I ask people this question all the time in order to matter.
I have to be tough. I have to be improving. I have to be achieving. I have to be the best. I have to be special. I have to be perfect. I have to be impressive and admired. I have to be attractive. I have to compromise on my values. I have to seek approval. How do all those feel whenever you hear those things in order to matter, I have to do those things.
[00:39:28] Chris Case: Stressful. Stressful. Next to Impossible.
[00:39:31] Sonya Looney: Impossible.
[00:39:32] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:39:33] Sonya Looney: And it’s based on comparison. It’s based on
[00:39:36] Chris Case: outcome.
[00:39:36] Sonya Looney: Yeah. And grants was actually one of the closest things that actually does create, mattering, make a difference to others. But when you make it contingent upon how many people you’ve heard from, whenever you turn it into an objective outcome, it blocks the feeling of mattering.
And so I always encourage people to think about. What are these myths? What are the things that you feel like you have to do because you already do intrinsically matter, but where you’re looking for that affirmation of it, it can undermine that. So it’s like, well, if I have to win, there’s gonna be, many times you’re not going to win.
So does that mean if you don’t win that you don’t matter? There’s gonna be lots of times you feel like you need to be tough. Well, what choices are you going to start making if you think that in order to matter you have to be tough? Well, you’re probably gonna be racing the level 100 wearing a cast thinking that you’re being badass, which that was me not a good idea.
You know, there you start making these choices that actually undermine that sense of mattering rather than support it because you’re looking for it in the wrong places.
[00:40:32] Chris Case: And how does perfectionism play a role in this?
[00:40:36] Sonya Looney: Excellent question. Perfectionists are always trying to prove their competence through their achievements.
They overvalue their achievements and they undervalue themselves. So for them, their myths of mattering are that in order to matter, I have to be perfect if the thing that I do isn’t perfect, if my result isn’t perfect. Then I don’t matter at all. And there’s something called self-image goals versus compassionate goals.
And perfectionists tend to have these self-image goals where they’re trying to prove themselves and the contents of their goal are focused on that because if they don’t prove themselves. Then they don’t feel like they’re worthy and they feel shame. So it’s a very challenging cycle. Perfectionism is a whole other conversation, but perfectionism kind of, if you look at it, there’s two components to it.
One is in the excessive striving of never good enough. So you’re striving so hard and it’s never good enough, and then you work even harder and you work even harder, and then you burn out the other piece. So if someone’s like, well, I’m a recovering perfectionist. I don’t need my work to be perfect. It’s in how you view your achievements.
Even if you’re not striving excessively, you look at your achievements and you’re like, well, that’s not good enough. And you debrief all of the things that you did wrong instead of looking at a big picture view of what this thing actually means and that, that is exactly what I did my masters on, and I came up with a, like a model for perfectionist to help them for.
Not only just look at these objective outcomes that are never good enough, and this cycle is just exhausting.
[00:42:01] Grant Holicky: First of all, I would love anything that you produce during your Master’s on perfectionism because it is one of the hardest things to coach in sport. Because it puts people automatically on the back foot in terms of positivity, because perfectionism is almost by definition, impossible, right?
And so we’re always feeling like we’re failing when we’re striving towards perfectionism, whether that’s in achievement or whether that’s in output, no matter what that is. And it’s very hard for athletes. To feel good about much of anything when they’re struggling with perfectionism. So let’s do a podcast down the road just on that.
[00:42:39] Sonya Looney: Yeah. ’cause there’s so much there to talk about,
[00:42:41] Grant Holicky: both anecdotally and research based. Right? I mean, so much of my life as a coach. I can’t tell you how much time is consumed and burned. Working with and talking about and trying to infuse any positivity with perfectionist athletes, it’s very, very, very difficult.
[00:42:58] Trevor Connor: There’s an interesting dichotomy there that I’ve always wanted to dive deeper into, which is. When I’ve watched really successful athletes, they dial in their training. There is a certain perfection to their training, but when you talk to them about it, that’s not what they’re seeking. They actually give themselves a break more than I see in a lot of amateur athletes.
When a workout doesn’t go perfectly. Or a meal or whatever doesn’t go perfectly. So there’s this interesting thing that they really do have their training dialed in, but they don’t seem to be as obsessed with perfectionism as you see in a lot of other athletes.
[00:43:36] Grant Holicky: One of the things that I’ve noticed a lot lately is there is a trend towards optimization in athletics.
Like I’ve got every aspect of my life. This is the look on ineos and the small things that you can do. Whereas we’re missing on the big things. But when we’re trying to optimize diet and sleep and rest and saying off our legs, all of these things in and of itself, that schedule and that planning becomes exhaustive and it becomes its own cognitive load.
And it’s extraordinarily hard to work with that high of a cognitive load.
[00:44:08] Sonya Looney: And it detracts from wellbeing. Optimization can come at the cost of wellbeing
[00:44:12] Grant Holicky: and which one’s more valuable. Right. And I think you and I. Would scream from the rooftops that wellbeing is more valuable in terms of performance.
There’s times you’re gonna be out of bounds. I don’t think there’s anybody that isn’t trying to perform at a high level that doesn’t have times when they’re out, not out of balance, but you’re not supposed to be out of balance all the time. And I think that’s something that’s missed a little bit. And it comes back to.
How we define ourselves, as you said before about uh, like I want to be tough. They’re almost pushing themselves out of balance on purpose. ’cause they’re toughing their way through it.
[00:44:44] Sonya Looney: And I’m gonna be contrarian a little bit here and say that like, if you are trying to make every single little thing perfect to optimize your performance, you are making yourself.
Less resilient, less able to cope. Because what if things don’t go that way? What if you can’t sit down whenever you’re like in line to pick up your registration? Or like, what if you miss your recovery drink? What if you don’t get enough sleep? Like all these things happen all the time in real life. And so if you think that you have to get all those things dialed in order to perform well, and then you don’t get to do that.
You are not gonna be in a good mental head space on race day. I get up on my soapbox about this a little bit, so I’ll, I’ll get down now. No, no. Please
[00:45:24] Grant Holicky: continue. No, I’m gonna give you a boost. Just go.
[00:45:26] Sonya Looney: Okay. So my racing is like stage racing, right? Like I did lots of international stage racing all around the world.
Where you don’t get your creature comforts like you’re sleeping on the ground. You don’t get the food that you’re used to getting. Things are disorganized, and so if I went into those situations or like I don’t have access to a power outlet to plug in my NormaTec, it’s like if you start obsessing over those details.
It actually crushes you. Like I have seen people freak out because they can’t do their perfect pre-race routine in the morning, and then they don’t perform well. And these are people who are faster than me, but because they get in their head about it, they are less able to cope.
[00:46:05] Trevor Connor: So maybe I’ll throw this out based on everything you’re saying, and this might address this dichotomy that I was seeing, is there’s two approaches you can take to trying to perfect your training and racing.
One is to have a very negative view on it, where you beat up on yourself every time you fail to do what’s perfect. The other way is to focus more on optimization and say, I’m just always gonna try to train better. But not get too worked up when you don’t quite get there when things go wrong, it’s more positive.
I just wanna keep trying to improve this as best I can, but I know that’s a, that’s an ideal that I’ll never achieve.
[00:46:43] Sonya Looney: Or here are the things that I know make me do well because all these optimization hacks, they don’t work for every single person. So if you have this massive list like that doesn’t mean they’re gonna work for you.
Figure out a few things that work well for you, and then work on your resilience. Work on the fact that you can say. When things don’t go to plan, I know that I am going to be able to reach inside myself and still be able to perform at my best, whatever that best is on that day.
[00:47:08] Grant Holicky: And I think a big part of this speaks to introspection.
It’s, it speaks to looking back at some of your past performances and going, you know what, I felt like this this time in the past and I was great the next day. Like I’ve gotten to the point of trying to reframe terrible legs on Friday, right? Like I’m walking up the steps and my legs hurt and going, you know what?
I remember back in 2022 when I couldn’t walk up the stairs the day before a race. I crushed it the next day. And it’s a fact. I’m not just making stuff up and blowing smoke. It’s an actual fact. It actually happened, and it’s one of the best ways to beat back any degree of anxiety. The anxiety’s not gonna go away.
But when you can combat it with facts and you can combat it with something that actually happened, you’re gonna move through it much easier. But all of this requires introspection. And even back to what you’re saying, Trevor, the striving is also about taking moment and going, that workout went really, really well, or I did a really nice job on that.
It wasn’t about the numbers. It was about how hard I worked. It was about my resilience. It was about how well I worked through the hard parts. Those almost have more to do with what you’re able to do down the road than anything else because if we’re just checking boxes, when we do things really, really well, then again, it breeds this mindset that everything has to go well or that everything went well.
You know, one of my favorite observations of athletes is after they have a great race. And they, let’s be honest, they probably were in flow or they probably were in the zone and they come back and as a definition of flow or zone, they’re going, yeah, I don’t remember much of it. So it was easy. You’re like, dude, no, it wasn’t easy.
I saw you. There was snot coming out of every orifice. I know it wasn’t easy. It was miserable, but your brain frames it as nothing hurt because you were in this place. And flow is so difficult to get into. It’s reminding ourselves that pain and discomfort and anxiety is part of achievement. And so, you know, it is taking these moments to look at something right after it happened and go, how did that go?
How did I feel about that? And that’s why it’s so important, as Sonya said before, to go to an athlete and say, how did that feel? You tell me about it, gimme some more information,
[00:49:26] Sonya Looney: and making sure you’re distinguishing between achievement and accomplishment. How did that feel? What are the things that went well?
Helps you have a broader view than an objective thing that you’re measuring.
[00:49:38] Grant Holicky: Achievement and accomplishment. Trevor is like the difference between efficiency and accomplishment. It’s a running joke.
[00:49:45] Trevor Connor: I,
[00:49:45] Grant Holicky: I
[00:49:47] Trevor Connor: feel like I got insulted, but I’m actually really complimented that Grant listened to that episode. He did.
Or he at least read the title.
[00:49:55] Sonya Looney: Now
[00:49:55] Trevor Connor: I know Grant listens to the show. So I think to round this out, the final question that we have to ask is, what can coaches do to help build this sense of mattering in their athletes? What are some good, practical suggestions you can offer?
[00:50:12] Sonya Looney: I mean, the first is coming back to the noticing practice of seeing what somebody is doing well and saying what they did well, why it mattered, and also attributing it to their strengths and their unique qualities like that is huge.
Another thing is making sure that the coach knows you, like what’s going on in your life beyond just your athletics, and doesn’t only just talk about your athletics. Helping you reflect on your accomplishments that are more than just achievements. Because whenever you see the difference that you made, how you helped somebody else, the ways that you grew, you know, in your own abilities, those are things that contribute to mattering.
But if the athlete is only focusing on these outcome achievements or on things you needed to be perfect, that’s gonna undermine it. So helping them have a broadened perspective of what they’re actually doing and who they are as a person is a really great place to start.
[00:51:06] Grant Holicky: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with that more.
I just think, to me, so much of sport, it’s so easy to have an athlete boil sport down to achievement. I mean, what the outcome was, what the result was. And I had an athlete say to me this season during cross, that they felt like cross got really binary for them. They placed well, good, placed poorly bad, and that was everything that we had spent three, four years trying to work against.
And it’s just because of the way this season’s set up. That’s what it felt like. And there’s so much outside pressure that creates that, especially when you get to a high level and people are covering what you’re doing and saying, oh, you won or you lost, or this and that happened. Really trying to just make it about more than what the athlete achieved, right?
What did they put out? What did they do? How did they do it? Well, what are they doing in the rest of their life? Because we don’t have that many pro athletes anymore. They’re pro cyclists that are truly just cyclists, right? They’re working. They have other jobs. They have those things, and even spending a little time going, yeah, but look how successful you are in the rest of your life right now.
Look at what you’re striving to create in the rest of your life that is creating something for later after cycling.
[00:52:20] Sonya Looney: Look who cares about you in your life too. Yeah. Beyond even just the things that you’re producing.
[00:52:25] Grant Holicky: Absolutely. And look who’s there supporting you and, and honestly, this is the biggest role of a coach in some ways.
They have that thing right in front of them that says, this person cares about me beyond just my output. And if you can create that relationship, you’re way ahead of the game with your athletes.
[00:52:42] Chris Case: Sonya, you’ve done this before. Grant, you’ve done this many times before. We like to close out with take home messages.
We’ll give you first right of refusal. Sonya, do you wanna go first or last or somewhere in the middle?
[00:52:55] Sonya Looney: I’ll go somewhere in the middle.
[00:52:55] Chris Case: Okay. Grant, I’m gonna pick on you. You go first. Give us your take home message on mattering.
[00:53:00] Grant Holicky: It’s gonna be a lot of the same things I’ve already said. I think that the, one of the biggest pieces for me with mattering is that in part, mattering is defined by.
Seeing the whole person, not just the athlete and their output. So reminding people to look at the bigger picture beyond just what the result is. Right? What impact do you have on the community? What impact does the community have on you as a coach? How well are we enhancing what the athlete does in the rest of their lives?
I’ve long said that I think the purpose of coaching is enhancing an athlete’s life through sport. It is about their whole life and mattering is speaking to that whole thing, and it’s going to improve wellbeing. It’s going to improve happiness, and it is something that we can take control of and and do something about.
For
[00:53:51] Chris Case: me, I just enjoy this conversation because it actually makes anybody who listens. The hope would be that it makes people better, human beings, better friends, better family members, because they’ll. Perhaps change the way they have conversations with people. They’ll notice things, they’ll reflect back what they’re hearing in conversation.
These are life skills just as much as they are. Anything else for any context, whether it’s sport or in fact, I would say it’s more important to show that people matter to you in life than in it does in sport, although that is important too. So I just enjoy these conversations because I think it improves.
Behavior. Sonya
[00:54:31] Sonya Looney: mattering is about adding value and feeling valued, and it goes beyond just yourself. So looking for the evidence that, number one, that you are adding value and feeling value to yourself, but also where you are adding value to others and how that is showing up for them. How you’re helping people, how you’re listening to people, how you’re reflecting back the things that they’re doing well, so that you can help them also feel like they matter, and that mattering goes so far beyond any goal, outcome, or achievement, and that all of your actions can contribute to helping you feel this way.
[00:55:08] Trevor Connor: Trevor, this is, I think, a really important subject, but it, it really, Sonya is your area of expertise, not ours. So the only thing I have to add to the conversation is just that importance of consistency. I’ve seen this from experience that you can reinforce this with somebody dozens of times. It just takes one time to really take it away from them.
So as a coach or as an athlete, really be consistent and really constantly communicate that self-worth in the individual. Thank you so much for joining us, guys.
[00:55:39] Sonya Looney: This was great. I really hope that athletes and coaches just start thinking about this experience on a daily basis. Think about the things that are meaningful about your accomplishments and your relationships, and what you’ll probably find is that it’s because you felt like you mattered.
[00:55:56] Chris Case: That was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcasts. Be sure to leave us a rating and review. And don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube. Give us a like, give us a subscribe. Help us reach new audiences. As always, remember that the thoughts and opinions expressed on Fast Talk are those of the individual.
We love your feedback. Join the conversation@forums.fast talk labs.com. Join us on social media at Fast Talk Labs for access to our endurance sports knowledge base. Continuing education for coaches as well as our in-person and remote athlete services. Head to Fast Talk labs.com. For Sonya Luli, Trevor Connor at Grant Hokey.
I’m Chris Case. Thanks for listening.
