Tools to Perform Under Pressure with Mental Performance Coach Greg Poss

Welcome to Revenue Builders, hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. Greg Poss spent decades playing and coaching professional hockey across North America and Europe, including the Mannheim Eagles to a championship and coaching the German national team. He now applies that experience as a mental performance coach, helping athletes, coaches, and leaders build stronger responses under pressure. In this mini-sode, Greg explains how to recognize when anxiety, frustration, or anger has taken over. how breath awareness can help you regain focus, and why the moment you start blaming the coach, the customer, or the circumstances, you have already given up control of the next move. Let's dive in.

So I think that when you find yourself being reckless, um you can that's a trigger for yourself because we're kind of bordering on this how do you know when you're not how do you know when you're in lower higher brain i think we identify a few things here number one is if you're thinking and you've got the capacity to ask yourself if i'm in higher brain or lower brain and you can think that you've got a good chance of getting to the higher brain if you're breathing yes you're if you're cognizant of your breathing you are probably on your way or in the higher brain. But if you're not aware at all of your breath, and by the way, that's why God designed us that way. He wanted the breath to be in the lower brain. He doesn't want us to think about having to take a breath. And there's a lot of things like that in life. However, those same things that were designed for us to keep us alive, we're able to check them In our higher brain, like how am I breathing? Am I breathing deeply or am I breathing shallowly? And Greg, you probably have these things of like, let's just kind of put a pin on this one. Let's nail these on your research. How do we know when we're in one or the other? And then some things that we can do to pull ourselves up and out.

Yeah, well, a real simple way is to recognize what state we're in. Like I said before, if we're angry, anxious, frustrated, any of those negative emotions, we're in our lower brain. If we recognize that we're peaceful, that we're focused, that we're aware, that we're joyful, that means we're in our higher brain. And when we talk about breathing, why does in any kind of breathing technique is good. There's a reason why in martial arts for the last, you know, 10,000 years or whatever, they focus a lot on breath. Because when you're in a martial arts or MMA, that's a very fearful situation. When we learn the ability to slow our breath down, it sends the safe signal to our brain, everything's okay out there. If we're breathing shallow, all of a sudden our brain's like, oh man, this must be a dangerous situation. It becomes fearful. And that's why breathing is so powerful. With my clients, we just do a very, very simple 4-7-8 breathing technique. Breathe in for four, hold for seven, breathe out for eight. And it's amazing. If you have a big putt, a three-footer and your buddy tells you, I'll give you 20 bucks if you make it. If you just step back and, and do a couple of rounds of four, seven, eight breathing. It's amazing how calm