Friendship trick

This is the reason you must train hard in the off-season to attain a new level of performance, then in the in-season you do what it takes to maintain your new level. So when you return back to the off-season, you'll be able to build again starting from a better base. There is nothing I love more than to coach and observe the best of the best in the world at World Competitions. As one of the coaches for Team Canada at the IWF World Championships in Pattaya, Thailand in 2019, I felt like a kid in a candy store! It was the most prominent Olympic weightlifting competition in the world. From the rest area, training hall, to the stage, I watched closely, had conversations, and made hundreds of notes. I have also gathered experiences and interviewed numerous clients as well as athletes who became top professional in their sports. Given all things equal being that these athletes all have the elite level of strength, speed, and power--the factor that separates the ones that are extraordinary is their mental toughness. Through these cultural legends, we see the idea that power, if it doesn't corrupt, might at least make one lose sight of how the other half (or 99%) lives. Let's consider some evidence for this idea. Loosened Inhibitions Just as people with power have greater access to and control over resources, they also have greater freedom to do as they please. In contrast, those with little power and low socioeconomic status face many constraints on what they can do and be. Dacher Keltner and colleagues (Keltner et al. Approach motivation orients the person toward achieving positive outcomes and reward, whereas inhibition or avoidance motivation orients the person toward avoiding negative outcomes and punishments. According to this theory, having an approach orientation means that you pursue your goals without too much concern or awareness of the obstacles that might stand in the way (Whitson et al. Having power even changes how we talk. When undergraduates were randomly assigned a high (versus low) rank in a negotiation exercise, their voices suddenly became higher pitched and more variable in loudness, perhaps because they felt less inhibited about talking as loud as they pleased from moment to moment. We need to recognize our common humanity: everyone deserves the right to dignity, food, health care, and shelter. Lack of compassion for others carries a heavy societal cost.

It plays out as stress, anxiety, depression, and bullying. According to the World Health Organization, anxiety and depression cost the global economy $1 trillion per year in lost productivity. Here, again, the necessity of rejecting scare tactics emerges. To be compassionate, people need to feel safe. The biological mechanisms that drive us to nurture and offer care to others are blocked by distress, anxiety, and hostility. People are wired to pay attention to threat, which triggers fear, James says. Most things in the world are good; In 2019, researchers at the University of Edinburgh announced the discovery of a genetic difference among people who show greater empathy for animals. ABSOLUTE FOCUS AND DISCIPLINE In the sport of Weightlifting, the most dominating teams during the Worlds were China, North Korea, and Georgia. The North Korean athletes were performing a large volume of heavy sets at close proximity to competition. They were going at high intensity for at least two hours. Most coaches I know would believe that this is extremely excessive work so close to a competition. But North Korea won medals and broke world records. These weightlifters obviously trained countless hours a day back home. I don't know how many hours and sessions they did on a daily basis, but I am sure that this is a full-time job. The point is that their work capacity is insane, and they have medals and world records from the 2019 IWF World Championships to prove it: two gold, four silvers, and two bronze medals. Every one of their athletes placed on the podium in their respective weight class. What's more, perceivers used those acoustic cues to accurately infer that the speakers were high in rank (Ko et al. Other research suggests that a sense of power can create a feeling of distance between the self and others, allowing for the kind of abstract thought needed to make complex decisions (Smith & Trope, 2006;

Smith et al. This can make it easier for those in power to achieve more and solve thorny problems that face the group, but it can also disinhibit people from harming people with less power (Galinsky et al. Guinote, 2007; Keltner et al. For example, in one study, four members of a fraternity were brought into the lab and encouraged to tease each other (Keltner et al. In each group, two individuals were relatively new to the fraternity and thus had lower status, whereas two were higher-status members of the group. It won't surprise you that these guys had little difficulty sitting around the room teasing one another. Higher-status fraternity brothers teased others (regardless of their status) with little concern for whether they might humiliate them or display their dominance over them. Previous studies have shown that farmers with higher empathy toward their dairy cattle translate those feelings into the care and attention they provide these animals, which in turn, correlates with higher milk yields. People who share their lives with dogs or cats, and the vets who care for these pets, typically score higher on their capacity to recognize and empathize with an animal in pain. Empathy is thus an important factor in positive relationships between humans and other animals. It's long been known that our feelings about other animals are shaped by our experiences, cultures, religious beliefs, personalities, and more. This new research represents the first time scientists have shown that genetics may also play a role. Oxytocin is a hormone that boosts social bonding between people. In their experiment, the researchers found that people who showed a higher empathy for animals had a specific version of the gene that produces oxytocin. Compassionate humpback whales? Humans may not be the only species capable of compassion. Humpback whales, it turns out, deliberately interfere with attacking killer whales to help others in distress. They even smashed some records. That is eight medals just for their totals, and multiple world records.

An impressive feat for a country that has probably limited technological resources and with that, they make it up with focus and discipline. I observed the top teams training and communicating. These dominant teams worked together as a whole; Helped each other as a team, ate together as a team, and had an amazing cohesiveness as a team. Most often, they were not even talking to each other, but they know exactly what was going on. They were in sync. No one can accomplish that without a proper system and years of training. To get that focus and discipline, one has to get rid of the distractions, such as phones for one. But lower-status brothers were more prosocial in the way they teased high-status brothers. They would try to tease their big brothers in ways that acknowledged their status or flattered their strengths. For example, when asked to come up with a nickname for a person using two initials, 30% of lower-status brothers gave higher-status brothers names that were essentially flattering (eg, MM = Muscle Machine, GM = Girl Magnet). In contrast, only 7% of higher-status brothers gave these positive teases to their lower-status brothers. Most of the time these higher-status brothers gave insulting teases (eg, PP = Pimple Party, LI = Little Impotent). Does this mean that the powerful are more unethical than those lacking power? Not necessarily. Upper-class individuals--those with the money and power--are more unethical than the poor, but only in situations in which acting unethically would benefit them, personally (Dubois et al. If you look instead at situations in which acting unethically can benefit other people, such as stealing medicine for a sick child, the relationship between power and ethicality flip-flops: Now lower-class individuals are prone to behave more unethical than that of upper-class individuals. Having high power doesn't make you unethical, per se, just more willing to do whatever serves your selfish interest. They don't just defend their own babies or close relatives. They intervene on behalf of other species--a gray whale calf with its mother, a seal hauled out on an ice floe, even an ocean sunfish.

Humpbacks act to relieve the suffering of others: the classic definition of compassion. First-person accounts of animals saving other animals are rare. Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist with the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, describes a pivotal encounter he witnessed in Antarctica in 2009. A group of killer whales forced a Weddell seal they were attacking off an ice floe. The seal swam frantically toward a pair of humpbacks that had inserted themselves into the action. One of the huge humpbacks rolled over on its back and the four-hundred-pound seal was swept up onto its chest between the whale's massive flippers. When the killer whales moved in closer, the humpback arched its chest, lifting the seal out of the water. And when the seal started slipping off, the humpback, according to Robert, gave the seal a gentle nudge with its flipper, back to the middle of its chest. Charlie Francis once said to me, Part-time athlete, part-time results, and Matthew Crawford also stated, attention is a resource--a person has only so much of it. This attention economy is ruining world-class training for all sports. World-class athletes do not try to be Insta-famous; They draw people's attention, feeling compelled to give these remarkable athletes the attention they deserve, taking photos and videos of them dominating. And not the other way around. Their absolute focus and discipline were so admirable that they gained such awe from other people and lifters. Here is the one simple truth and is a big part of our brand: You must become so good, they can't ignore you. The cold fact is that nobody cares about your past, your circumstances, and what challenges you have gone through. Sure, they may be important and may be the truth, but until you leave someone in awe, none of those things matter. Leave mediocre training at mediocre gyms because greatness is not achieved in mediocrity. Less Empathy The findings from the fraternity study just mentioned partly reflect subordinates being extra cautious around their leaders, but they also raise the possibility that people in positions of power are less compassionate toward their subordinates or those who are disadvantaged.