A Conversation With Jack Llewellyn, Ph.D.

What's the difference between coaching a world-class athlete like Cy Young pitcher John Smoltz and coaching a company manager?

Believe it or not, there's very little difference. The principles that make a world-class athlete successful in his or her game are the same principles that can propel a high-performing individual to reach his or her potential.

Top-level company performers need mental training just like athletes. We teach them to use the same approach and strategies used by top athletes to properly assess abilities, correctly focus the right processes to reach goals, thrive on stress, and quickly recover from adversity in order to become star performers.

You talk about executives having a "winning attitude." Explain what you mean.

There's a difference between merely surviving in a corporate setting and winning in one. Winners play to win. Survivors play not to lose. By that I mean that corporate survivors are just hanging on, not trying to win, but just wanting not to lose. They weather the ups and downs and are still standing at the end. But they often pay a huge price in both their professional and personal lives.

Having a winning attitude means being able to make the stress of winning in the corporate world work for you instead of against you. You learn to make stress your ally, you learn to recover quickly from setbacks, and you learn to identify and balance what's important in your life. It's a complete mental attitude that focuses on winning rather than just surviving.

How do you define a winner?

In the corporate world, many people are caught up in a position...where they are in the hierarchy, try to get a promotion or a raise, etc. They spend all their time and energy on achieving those successes—working long hours and on weekends. Then one day they wake up and realize they've achieved those goals but they don't have anyone there to celebrate with them. They've sacrificed their personal life for their career.

A true winner is someone who wins professionally and personally. They understand why they do what they do. In other words, they know that they're working hard so that they will have rewards personally. A winner is someone who matches every professional success with a personal one. They achieve balance in their life which is a critical part of winning.

Are the prerequisites of success the same for athletes as other people?

Yes, but you have to have talent. Nothing replaces talent; it's the basic building block for success. If you have talent, you can supplement it with a winning attitude and that combination— talent and attitude—is what will propel you to excel.

Let's face it, professional athletes and most high-performing individuals have risen to that level because they have talent. They wouldn't be there if they didn't. But to make a star performer even better they must have the mental tools to have a winning attitude, to take stress and make it work for them. When there is equal talent, the person with the right mental attitude will come out ahead every time.

Most corporate executives are loath to talk about their liabilities; after all, there's an underlying hint of weakness in that. How can having a better understanding of one's weaknesses, or liabilities, work for them?

Most people have a general understanding of what their liabilities are. They may not openly express it, but they have that general understanding. Surprisingly, if they really evaluated their performance, they would find they spend a great deal of time avoiding their liabilities. So they spend much of their time trying to not lose as opposed to trying to win.

When we work with business clients, we get them to delve into their liabilities as well as their assets. We show high-performing individuals how to take the time and emotion they spend avoiding these liability issues and use that time and energy to their advantage. Executives and other high-performing individuals learn how to recognize these risks and share them with others so that they can make themselves better by neutralizing or even removing them.

The people who learn to recognize their liabilities end up surrounding themselves with team members who can offset those risks with their own individual assets.

How can we make stress work for us, not against us?

Each year, companies spend millions of dollars trying to help employees deal with stress. If management understood that making stress work for you is a mindset, where you turn negative perceptions of stress into positive perceptions, then they could save millions of dollars each year.

When I work with athletes and other clients, we reveal and examine the stressors. On the negative side, the impact of stress can be devastating. It worsens performance and even makes you ill, depressed or feeling burnt out. But if you use stress to drive you to an emotional edge where you can attain an optimal level of performance, then stress becomes a positive. Learning how to use stress to bring out our optimal level of performance brings great rewards. And once people turn stressors into positives, they will use them as performance assets.

What is "speed of recovery?"

In business, people constantly have to recover from conflict, crisis and stress. For example, sales representatives have to bounce back daily, even hourly, from rejection. Everyone is confronted regularly with situations from which they need to recover so that they can return to a desirable level of performance.

In coaching, we examine why it is critical for them to recover from adversity and to do so quickly. This ability separates talented people who win consistently from talented people who win occasionally, lose, or just survive. Being able to recover quickly allows people to perform better for a longer period of time than people who don't have the recovery technique.

How can corporate coaching benefit a company as well as an individual?

Executives cannot succeed on their own. Winners recognize the importance of a team. Individual success is critical to team success, and team success is critical to individual success. In other words, corporations are only as good as the performers within their walls. When individuals learn to identify their assets and liabilities, focus on the right processes to reach their goals, make stress work for them and learn to recover from adversity, the corporation will reap the benefits in terms of more fulfilled and productive employees.

The Center for Winning Performance is a "mental training" organization dedicated to helping athletes and other high performers develop and keep a winning attitude to fully reach their potential, both profesionally and personally.

This center was founded by Jack Llewellyn, Ph.D., a world renowned sports psychology consultant, author, professor, business coach and speaker.
John Smoltz, National League Cy Young Award Winner, 1996: "Jack Llewellyn's approach is simple and straightforward, and it can be applied to all areas of the professional workplace as well as to everyday life. His program teaches you how to adapt to and overcome pressure and increases your ability to persevere and get better, instead of giving in and getting frustrated. Jack has helped me tremendously."
Tom Glavine, National League Cy Young Award Winner, 1991 and 1998: "As a professional athlete, I'm always looking for an edge—especially a mental edge—and Jack Llewellyn's program has helped me greatly in that area. Jack's program helped with me deal with adversity, make the necessary adjustments and recover. Jack has been a huge help with the mental side of my game."
Greg Poplarski, Senior Vice President, Prudential Retirement, National Sales "We recently had the opportunity to have Dr. Llewellyn address our top sales performers. I received tremendous feedback on his talk. Llewellyn has a unique way of drawing parallels between the successes and failures in sports and business. He is passionate, humorous, interesting and a great storyteller. Most importantly, the concepts Llewellyn focuses on can be immediately incorporated into day-to-day business."