Latest / The Uplift- with Luke Pollock / #27 - Solo Pod- Overcoming Self Doubt in Sport + Business
Transcript
- Luke Pollock: The counterfeit innovator is widely self-confident, but the real one is scared to death. That is a quote from Stephen Pressfield in the War of Art book on his section on resistance and why we have resistance to do the things we most want to do in life and the things that are most important to us. That's gonna be the theme of today's podcast, alongside some fear and rehab and how we can enjoy our rehab a little bit more and what good rehab looks like and how to go through rehab as an athlete. Shouldn't be too long. I'm gonna riff off. I've got a few notes beside me, a few things I've been mulling over this past week and while I've been away. so we'll start with a bit of an update. I got married in July, which was truly one of the best days, if not the best day of my life. It was yeah, just everything I I would have hoped for, to be honest. Everything went smoothly and I feel really blessed to to have had all my friends and my family there and some people pulled out some serious stops to be there. So if you're listening to this and you're one of those people, you know how thankful I am already. But yeah, it was a really, really cool day and I feel most thankful that I could be fully present on that day. I had to work quite hard before on the run-up to it and the lead up to it. And that's why I didn't have some pre-recorded podcasts. So I stopped at twenty-five and I'm starting again. So had a had a bit of a month off, but it allowed me to be fully present on the day of my wedding and on my honeymoon and give me time to to think about the direction I want things to go in and the direction things are going in. And I think it's really important to have those periods and those times where you can think, is this actually what I want to be doing? Am I pleased with the with the message I'm delivering or could things be a be a little bit better and a little bit sharper? And I've come back with new ideas and a new reality that I can actually be delivering a better product to my athletes still. There's still loads of work I can do. And this product is really only getting going in terms of online and in person rehab. As I learn, as I continue to get better, of course the product will get better. But actually how I deliver that and Even simple things like the exercise library could do with getting updated and you know, can I make it a bit more of a community for all of my athletes? Because I have about 10 athletes at the minute who are going through very, very similar things, but they're doing it individually with me. so can I actually bring them together, get us on some group calls, get us chatting about how things are going and create a bit more of a community and hopefully increase the enjoyment factor of that. So these are some ideas I've been playing around with. And then also posting some more self development content similar to that I post on the podcast, like things I've little breakthroughs I've had, like we're gonna talk about today. Posting that on my actual Instagram and and having that as part of my brand is quite exciting for me. so that is gonna be something I play around with. I'm gonna be playing around a lot with that on TikTok. And then anything that I feel resonates highly with people, I'm gonna be pushing over my Instagram. But It's mainly gonna be rehab stuff, to be honest. so yeah, went to Kenya then for two and a half weeks on honeymoon, had a blast. It was a bit of an adventure, a few hiccups along the way, but yeah, we we overcame a lot, which was a pretty cool start to the marriage, just to see and see how each one of us overcome like really, really tricky situations that we found ourselves in in Kenya. but we are home safely. thankfully, and we're back to work. So I'm so buzzing to be back. And I think this period between now and the end of 2026 is a really exciting one. It's almost like a little sprint towards the end of the year and thinking, right, how much can we get done? How far can we push the limits? And I feel fully in work mode. I remember I said in the podcast before that I had one foot in work and sort of one foot out of work because I had the wedding coming up. So I was trying to slow things down and try not to overcommit. But now I can just dive head first in, which really, really excites me. And I feel like it's what I'm it's it's what I'm here to do. It's what I'm on earth to do at the minute is not just play rugby and rehab people, but actually create content and find out the type of content I want to create. So it feels like very purposeful work. not all the time, but when I wake up in the morning I am excited to get going with my day, which is something that I that I really, really strive for for a long time. So let's go back to our quote to get into the podcast. I want to speak on self-doubt because I've had so much self-doubt not only with this page but throughout my playing career as well and throughout injury throughout injuries. and self-doubt is a huge limiter, and I want to reframe that for you today. So I was rereading The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. It's a beautiful book. there's parts of it which I don't agree with, but like any good book, There's lots and lots of meaty stuff in there that you can just chew over. So I was rereading it yesterday, again, and I just came across this quote which I'd already highlighted on my Kindle. The counterfeit innovator is widely self confident, but the real one is scared to death. Now what does this mean? Simply put, and I've summarized this, is the exact person we need in our industry or in that space is often the person that's too that's too scared to step forward. So the person that is gonna do some damage to the solution. So if we think about in terms of of rehab, because I know a lot of physios and athletes listen to this, the person who's gonna do some damage, okay, who doesn't really have much regard for how their advice impacts people is happy to step up nine times out of ten. They're thinking, I've heard this on X or I saw this in a raid, let me just repost it and in a different way and let it go viral and see what happens. And these people are often the people who blow up because they have really hot texts that are very far one way or very far the other. And then people start following their advice and that's when proper injuries will recur. It's the same with like financial advice and any any political stuff either. The people who are sensible and who have had their heads screwed on are less likely to enter the sphere because they don't want to be seen as entertaining these wild conversations. They're also too scared to step forward because they care too much about their advice, which is a good thing. Okay. So I worked in the NHS, as you all know, and I work with some of the best physios, that I've ever met there. And they would be so good and so well placed to share their knowledge and expertise online on Instagram. They could run a business like I have, with more knowledge probably. Probably not with an ACL rehab, because I've really d dove deep into that, but with loads of different specialities. Cause they've been physios years, right? But they would never do it because they think they don't know enough yet. And In some in some regards they're right. We never will know enough, but they know so much more than they realize they do. And they're looking to scholars, they're looking to people who've done PhDs, rather than they're looking to the people who give out advice currently online, which is pretty poor. so we need more people who are too scared to step out because ultimately they're they're the ones who care. They're the ones who are gonna make a difference, they're the ones who have something valuable to say, even though it might not be really polarizing. They're often the ones who understand the nuance of what is spun around healthcare, finances, politics. There's so much nuance to it. And the posts that do well are the posts that eliminate that nuance. Okay, which is really, really dangerous. Because if I tell everyone with a ruptured SEL, you all have to do this exercise by week twelve, we're gonna have retires because there's so much nuance. I don't know your situation, I don't know how well you you've recovered, I don't know what type of craft you've had. I don't know if you've had different involvement, if there's meniscus, MCL, et cetera. If you're break if you've been braced up for 12 weeks and you just got out, I don't know any of that, but that's not sexy to put across online. So people will just spit out these big facts and statements. However, the my colleagues that I've worked with before, you yourself, the person with a lot of self doubt, understands that nuance deeply. But instead of moving on despite understanding it, You get crippled by it a little bit and you're thinking, No, there's too much variables, there's there's too many things I'm uncertain about. And what happens if this happens and you haven't really said that there and you haven't covered everything, you haven't covered your back fully, and they let that cripple them and ultimately they never step forward into the self-doubt. So hopefully you you've taken some confidence that self-doubt is a good thing. It's actually It's a positive thing. It's the matter of fact is we need more informed people to speak out. There needs to be people who can help transform the industry for a positive way, whatever industry that may be. I'm not saying it only is healthcare. It's those people who care deeply for their art and for their job, that will that will have this this crippling fear and self-doubt. They will be the ones that are kept up at night because of that last conversation they had with the client. But those are the people who care, and those are the people that our athletes and our patients need. but instead they refuse to comment because they feel they're not yet fully informed and they get into this trap of feeling they need to be more informed or have more letters after their name. If it's not for yourself, then it's for the industry you're so you serve. That's that's how I feel. So If I let myself doubt cripple me, then I know a lot of rugby players that I've worked with would have had subpar care or would have not had the care or not coming coming back as quickly as they might have done or not had an enjoyable as an enjoyable experience. So even if it wasn't for me, even if I wasn't getting paid and even if I wasn't being positively impacted by posting online. Even if it's just for them, do it for someone else. Get out of your own way. And it feels a lot bigger and better when you do it for someone else, when you're serving others. So if it's not for yourself, for the industry you serve, the the industry you need, or the industry you're in needs more real innovators and less counterfeit ones. And that sort of leads me on to the second part. So Stephen Pressfield then goes on to talk. His chapters are very short. He goes on to talk about fear. So self-doubt and fear. often coexist. They're often seen as similar things. Fear tells us what we have to do. The more scared we are of the work or of a calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Because if it meant nothing to us, there would be no resistance or no fear. And that's so true, isn't it? If if your life meant nothing to you, you would do a double backflip off the cliff because bay but if you're scared, if you value your life, if you are scared of the pain you're gonna undergo then fear cripples up. You've got you've got something to lose here. If it doesn't matter to you, you won't be as scared. Okay. So why huge injuries in rugby terrify me at the minute is because I love my rugby and I'm loving playing at the minute. So that's it matters to me a lot. And and that tells me that I would be I would be fearful of losing that thing. But what I'm not gonna do is avoid playing every day. I'm gonna step into the fear anyway and do it in spite of. so often the more we care about something or the more involved in it we are, the more fearful we are to step further into that thing because we're scared of losing it. If it meant nothing to us, there would be no resistance or fear. So fear's actually quite a good thing. It's quite a positive thing because it shows that we care about that thing. And often when we care about something, we're gonna get better results. We're gonna do it well. Thing about Matthew McConaughey, the actor, this sprung to mind when I was reading this chapter. McConaughey in his early career was known for rom-coms. It's all he did. And then he made a big, big statement. He was offered to do his next rom-com. It would have been, yeah, easy, easy movie for him to do. And he was offered $14.5 million, but he turned it down because he made the statement: I want to differentiate myself. I want to go into dramas and more serious movies. He when when he was commenting on this, he said the switch was scary, but it was necessary. I was a rom com guy, but I wanted to try and make some other stuff. So he was scared, he was fearful, but he did it anyway. He knew there was real cost to this, real financial cost to this, and ultimately he Sorry, he could have flopped those early movies he made that weren't rom coms, and then he went on to make like Dallas Spires Clubs, et cetera. And we we might never have had the beauty of those movies if he didn't make that decision to move in in spite of of fear, in spite of being scared, but doing it anyway. And I think that's just a mess this is a message to myself, to my past self. This is just something I have really struggled with when I made the page. when I still give advice, I'm so fearful and I have self-doubt that I don't know enough or I should be doing more or I could be serving my athletes better. And there is an element of truth, but if I sat and was crippled by this fear, then no one would ever get anything. We wouldn't move forward. And I think it's innovators in the space who move forward despite not knowing anything, everything, sorry, who move forward despite being fearful. Those are the valuable innovators in and it's not we don't see that until we look back, right? I won't see actually when I was terrified to make my first post on this page or make my first voiceover real like two and a half years ago, I didn't I didn't see that in two and a half years later this would be my full time job. like McConaughey, we wouldn't have Dallas Buyers Club, we wouldn't have Interstellar as the movie they were if he didn't ever decline that $14.5 million. So I think stepping into the fear is really powerful. Overcoming your self-doubt is really powerful. And often they're indicators for what you actually need to do. So what you're most fearful of, but what you probably think about all the time, that's what you need to go after more often than not, which is kind of counterproductive. but I think it's really, really beautiful. I think that is like a lovely, lovely reframe because people often say, no, I'd be too scared to do that. Or Now I wouldn't be confident enough to speak on camera like you, but that's exactly why you should do it, because you're not confident enough. You need more reps at it, you need to get better, because you clearly have something you think it's worth saying. And if you think it's worth saying, it probably is. it's the people who don't think twice to get on camera and spite whatever nonsense that we need to worry about a little bit more. The self doubters, the fearful ones, they're the ones we need to see more of on on social media and in our industries in general. Then the final little bit I wanna speak about is just becoming detached and being more childlike in our rehab specifically. This is for my athletes as well as anyone who is rehabbing at the minute. I I'm I'm obviously still rehabbing my groin a little bit, but it's got it's got a lot better, which I'm very pleased with. But it's just it's just holding things less tightly, I think is what I want the overarching statement of this this piece to be. So when I'm rehabbing an ACL specifically, they will always ask me, Am I doing okay? Is the timeline matching up? Is this normal? Is this normal? And I get it. I completely get it. You want to see how you're comparing, how you're faring in the overall stage, if the big picture is still in line, which is completely fair enough. But often the people who grip onto those timelines more tightly are the ones who struggle. I remember talking to one of my older friends who has kids. And I was asking him about parenting and how he's finding it. And he said the best advice he received was you have to hold on to your kids like a bar of soap, which sounds like a weird analogy, but grip it, grip it too tightly, like helicopter parent them too much and they'll slip away from you. Or grip it too loosely and they'll also slip away. So you need to just hold the bar of soap with enough tension that it stays in your hand and then it can be useful, right? And I think the same is with rehab and rehab timelines and the the period of injury, like hold those timelines loosely in your hand and hold that period loosely in your hands as well. And often you'll do better because you'll enjoy the experience more. And this is something I want to integrate more with my athletes is how we can make the experience more fun. Injury seems such a negative thing, and I understand why, because we're being taken out of the thing we love, like I said earlier. a lot of fears associated around with injury, but can we try and reframe that in our little pocket of the internet and our little pocket of the world? Can we try and make it a period of growth, the period of learning where you come away and you think, you know what, I actually really enjoyed that six months away from the pitch. And I feel like I've come back back a better player because I've had more time to understand my body. I've had more time to look at game footage. I've had more time to get to know how the coaches work behind the scenes. And this is something I'm I'm gonna play around with a lot. And there's a Picasso quote a Picasso quote. and he says, It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. And I think that it's so cool that he's he's saying his best work pretty much becomes comes from when he's being childlike. And I've talked about being childlike before. you know, in the Bible we're called to to have faith like like children to not doubt to not overthink. And I think with rehab, you wanna you obviously don't want to treat the whole process like you're a child. I would say plan like an adult, but play like a child. So plan like an adult is mean make sure you have got really good people around you. Your injury is your responsibility, like I say, make sure you've got a good plan in place. But then hold that plan like a bar of soap and enjoy the process. In your rehab sessions, you should be smiling, you should be laughing as if it is a gym session, and we shouldn't be taking it too seriously all the time. Because when we go back to the pitch, you're gonna be moving, you're gonna be enjoying yourself again. So that enjoyment can only be restricted to the day we're back. We have to integrate some of that earlier on in our rehab and become a little bit less rob robotic. We have to take the pressure off, release the shackles, let our nervous system relax. And then the results will start to flow. I often find this when athletes are trying to regain extension at the minute. The tighter we grip onto it, the the more we push, push, push, push. Sometimes it makes it less likely to happen. Sometimes all you need to do is actually relax, enjoy it, try a few different things, which are maybe a bit more play, a bit more fun. And then before we know it, one day rolls into the next and our extension just appears one day. And the client will message me being like, you'll never believe it. I got that last few degrees extension. And it's maybe just because we reframed it, we took the pressure off that client or that athlete, and we allowed them to enjoy the process a little bit more in terms that allowed their nervous system to relax, their muscles to relax a little bit, and we weren't clenching that bar of soap too tightly. And the the thing we wanted most kept slipping away from us. So yeah, I think. Treat your craft like a bar of soap, I I guess is w what I want to end on. Whether you're injured, you're an injured athlete at the minute, whether you're playing at the minute as well. Like if you want to progress to the next level and playing, when I've wanted something the most, when I've gripped on so tightly, that's when I actually have put too much pressure on myself and not got the results I wanted. When I've enjoyed training and enjoyed the process a little bit more and genuinely just had a laugh. along the way, that's when I've actually been playing better. and that's not to say that I don't care and that I'm tech in the make, but it's more that I'm I'm genuinely curious and I'm genuinely interested in what people are doing and how we're training and why we're doing this and why we're doing that. You know, asking questions like a child again. and I think the same should be should be for rehab. So this is something that I want to integrate more with my athletes, like I've said. Anyway, I'm gonna stop the podcast there. I hope you've enjoyed that. little bit on fear, self-doubt, and then also letting go a little bit and trying to enjoy your process, whatever that might look like, a little bit more, whether that's building a business, rehabbing, playing. yeah, being more childlike. I suppose I should credit Drake Davis, who I follow, who I l I'm loving his stuff at the minute. I'm just eating up everything he puts out at the minute. And yeah, that is why a lot of my podcasts are gonna be a little bit more like this mindset side of things 'cause it's such a huge part of rehab that doesn't get talked about. So yeah, let's from from here on today, let's start making rehab a little bit more fun and a little bit more enjoyable because it's part of our sport, right? We're all gonna get injured. we're if we're in a contact sport, if we're a high level, we're gonna get injured at some point. We know it's coming. So why do we have to make that period of our life misery? Why can't we enjoy it a little bit and find different ways to do that and help each other along the way? Thanks so much for listening. If you haven't already, can you follow and give the the podcast five stars? Really helps me out. Also give me some feedback on how you find this episode. I'm gonna be playing around with the episode types and contents and guests I have on. So please message me on Instagram at LookPollock Online for how you find the episode. and yeah, I hope you have a great week. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you next week. Thank you.