Jul 10, 2020
Chris Pierce teaches mental toughness and discusses the lessons he learned from his son Griff who suffered a stroke as a young child and then again in the early months of 2020. Griff was a shining example of love and “living your best life” despite his disabilities. This episode is Hard hitting and a powerful reminder to love, live and learn now. Chris also shares his insights about finding hope in the darkest of times and his motivation to live HIS best life.
Highlighted Quotes
Pay Attention
The biggest thing was “Pay Attention”. Pay attention to what's helping you and what's hindering you. Get a glimpse of what's helpful and what's not. What I mean by that is what are the thoughts going through your head? ( That most of the time we're unaware of) Like, “oh I sucked that heat” but there's a reason why. Some of it is physical, maybe you didn't sleep well last night. So maybe if you didn't sleep well last night then we need to help teach you different things so that you can sleep better the night before. Or maybe it was something in the moment like thinking “you got eight points, and I only had a five” their mind starts speeding up. There are a million different things that happen to people, but the first step for me was always just exploring that and recognizing that everyone's different… you can't come to an athlete and say “here's the answer”, you could get lucky and you might have the answer for that person but really, everyone is so different that you have to understand who they are and they have to understand who they are first.
Understand yourself
So many people want to change so fast and so it's hard to get them to slow down, because they just want to implement. But before implementing like you have to know the right strategy, people just tend to want the results and so they say “give me a strategy”, “give me a technique” and go try everything, but it's like throwing darts blindfolded doing it that way. Take a step back and just try to understand yourself a little bit better. For example there is a confusion between positive and negative, ... or helpful and unhelpful because for some people getting angry, a negative emotion is helpful in a competitive surfing situation, it might give them an adrenaline spike increase their energy and their style of surfing might match that. For somebody else that might be the most detrimental thing ever because maybe they're more flowy and smooth. So many people just want to bypass that step. And it's also the hardest. The hardest step is to look at yourself… people don't like looking in the mirror to see their flaws. it's just hard to do.
“Who cares what people think?”
Griff didn't care if he fell in front of you, he was the first one to laugh at himself when he did fall. and you say “living his best life”... living his best life did not mean being successful. It just meant doing what he wanted to do and not caring about what anybody else thought. I think Griff taught me a huge lesson of “Who cares?”
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