FAREWELL

This week, NCAA March Madness wrapped up, and two teams were crowned National Champions—which means 134 other teams lost. This is the hard reality of any type of competition: the vast majority of people who compete will lose. But it's those who know how to lose well that can best set themselves up for a future win. On today's episode, Steve, Brad, and Clay discuss the best way to cope with the acute loss in a competition, and the more general loss of ability that comes with age: how can we learn to adapt as our bodies and skills change, and not chase the ghost of who we once were? If you are enjoying FAREWELL, do us a huge favor: text your favorite episode to three people so they can enjoy it, too. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Any time we are developing a new skill, hobby, craft, or practice, we have to go through various stages of development—these are called the four levels of competence. At the first level, you're learning and everything can feel difficult. At the fourth, you're in flow. By knowing what they are, you can identity where you're at on the progression, which, in turn, will help you figure out the tools you need to continue to grow, improve, and move to the next level. Today, Brad breaks down the four levels of competence, how you can move from novice to master, and ways to stay curious and playful even after you've reached a level of mastery.If you are enjoying FAREWELL, do us a huge favor: text your favorite episode to three people so they can enjoy it, too. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Good news, bad news. The good news: in our modern world of endless entertainment, we have essentially solved the problem of boredom. The bad news: turns out boredom wasn't a problem, but a skill. The ability to do deep, creative work, to complete a long cardio workout, to avoid mindlessly falling into social media doom scrolls—these all require an ability to be bored. As Manoush Zomorodi, host of NPR's TED Radio Hour, lays out in her book "Spark: How to Free Your Brain From Technology and Ignite Your Creativity," boredom affords us the patience we need to get to our most generative ideas, to process difficult emotions, and to work towards our long-term goals. On today's episode, Manoush tells us why (and how) we should build some boredom back into our lives. Plus: What else she has learned about having a healthy relationship to technology after years spent studying how it affects our mental, physical, and cultural health.If you are enjoying FAREWELL, do us a huge favor: text your favorite episode to three people so they can enjoy it, too. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"A ritual is routine with intention," says Katherine May (author of Wintering and Enchantment) on today's episode of The Coach Up. Whereas routines are a set of steps you don't have to think about, a ritual is about performing an action that consciously allows us to work in harmony with the various rhythms of the day, month, and year. In this way, rituals can become important ways to mark the passage of time and keep us on track as the days fly by. Since we're already three months deep into 2024, now is as good a time as ever to create rituals that will allow you to work towards your goals, and show up more consciously and with more intentionality. Katherine May helps explain how.Full FAREWELL Episode with Katherine May:"Knowing How to 'Winter' is a Year Round Skill"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/013-knowing-how-to-winter-is-a-year-round-skill/id1505257676?i=1000645443337Article referenced:"How to Set Yourself Free with Ritual" (Psyche)https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-live-free-and-in-harmonious-ease-with-confucian-ritualIf you are enjoying FAREWELL, do us a huge favor: text your favorite episode to three people so they can enjoy it, too. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week, ESPN's Wright Thompson wrote a wonderfully reported profile of Iowa's Caitlin Clark (link below), who is playing in her last NCAA tournament and capping off a career as one of college basketball's greats and it's all-time leading scorer. At the heart of that piece was a compelling question: What is the cost of greatness? How does someone like Caitlin Clark balance relentless hustle with joy and rest? Obsessional devotion with relaxation and play? Hyper competitiveness with teamwork and development? These are the questions that anyone trying to be great has to navigate, whether you're trying to set the NCAA scoring record or not. Today, Steve, Brad, and Clay use ESPN's Caitlin Clark story to try to better understand greatness and what it takes to get there."Caitlin Clark and Iowa Find Peace in the Process" by Wright Thompson (ESPN)https://www.espn.com/womens-college-basketball/story/_/id/39740282/caitlin-clark-iowa-2024-ncaa-women-basketball-tournament-ready-marchIf you are enjoying FAREWELL, do us a huge favor: text your favorite episode to three people so they can enjoy it, too. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Knowing how to be tired is a skill. If you don't know how to work with fatigue, you won't be able to push yourself when things get hard. On the other hand, if you only know how to push and can't understand your body's warning signals when it's overdoing it, you mind find yourself injured or burnt out. On this episode of The Coach Up, Steve Magness explains how to better walk that tightrope by getting to know—and making friends with—your fatigue.If you are enjoying FAREWELL, the best way you can support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing is to leave a review or share the show with a friend. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’ve got voicemail(s)! On the last roundtable, we opened up our phone lines a you all answered the call with some great questions. So today’s episode is dedicated to answering three of the issues raised: how to know when a relationship to exercise becomes unhealthy; (2) the psychological downsides to gamifying your movement practice, and how to know when to use intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation; (3) how to think about exercising and fitness as you age. Enjoy—and thanks for the great questions. If you are enjoying FAREWELL, the best way you can support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing is to leave a review or share the show with a friend. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The world can be pretty wonderful. It can also be pretty terrible. So we need a mindset that works for both of these circumstances. Unfortunately, these days, we often live on the extremes. On the one end of the spectrum, there's toxic positivity, which means remaining upbeat in the face of something that's really difficult, or hard, or sad, and needs to be experienced and processed as such. On the other , there's straight up hopelessness or nihilism, a sense that everything is so bad, we might as well just give up. We need something in between, a Goldilocks fit that accounts for difficulty but still allows for hope. That is where tragic optimism comes in. Brad writes extensively about this in his book, Master of Change. So today he joins the podcast to talk us through it.To learn more about tragic optimism, and other tools to help you to live in an ever-changing world, buy Brad's book, Master of Change. If you are enjoying FAREWELL, the best way you can support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing is to leave a review or share the show with a friend. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In his books The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain, Michael Easter explores two of the major complications of living in our modern world. The world is rife with comfort and convenience, which is great some of the time, but not all of the time since we need to discomfort to grow and become resilient. The world is also abundant, but humans have evolved to have a scarcity mindset, meaning that no matter how much we have, we're wired to crave more. This means we often struggle to do the necessary hard things, and can have a tendency to consume (foods, social media, substances) beyond the point of enoughness. These conditions are only exacerbated in a world that has made comfort more easily accessible than ever before, and that has been largely engineered to push us past the point of overconsumption. Enter Michael's work and wisdom: By bringing awareness to this reality, and to the mismatch between the world and our wiring, we can move towards embracing discomfort and finding lasting satisfaction.If you are enjoying FAREWELL, the best way you can support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing is to leave a review or share the show with a friend. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear makes the point that it's your habits, multiplied over time, that create the person you become. That's because habits compound. The difference between the person who reads 20 minutes a day and the person who doesn't may not seem that big on a day-to-day basis. But over the course of a year, the person with the reading habit will likely have read 30 to 40 more books than the person without that habit. So building the habits that are going to get us closer to what we want—and breaking the ones that hold us back—is a crucial skill. On today's Coach Up, Clay pulls six tips on building better habits from a conversation he had with James Clear, including why habits are more useful than goals, which of the four steps in habit formation is easiest to leverage to break a bad habit, and the "two-minute rule" for sticking with your habits on a busy day.Link to full interview: https://www.gq.com/story/how-to-break-bad-habitsIf you are enjoying FAREWELL, the best way you can support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing is to leave a review or share the show with a friend. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Health and fitness is in a weird place these days. On one hand, there’s a lack of foundational health literacy in society (as evidenced by a recent Exercise I.Q. Quiz in The New York Times that left us with more answers than questions: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/27/well/move/fitness-workout.html). On the other hand, we’re overloaded with fancy-sounding jargon that can leave even high-level exercise enthusiasts feeling like they need to do and learn more. Today, Steve, Brad, and Clay unpack how we got here and how we can get back to a more reasonable, attainable, and sustainable idea of wellness. Plus, the guys discuss a high-stakes hypothetical: Would you take part in a race against a person selected at random from the U.S. population, where the stakes are as follows: you win, you take home $1 million; you lose, you die? And listen to the end of the show to learn how to make the easiest $20 of your life.If you are enjoying FAREWELL, the best way you can support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing is to leave a review or share the show with a friend. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"You need to feel like a pot of water on the stove that's just about to start boiling over," says Molly Seidel, in describing what it feels like to run the marathon pace that won her the bronze at the last Olympics. "You just hold it there, right on that line." This is as draining mentally as it is physically, she says. In fact, Seidel says so much of what holds athletes back is their brain telling them to pull back because their going into the danger zone. The antidote? Learning how to be with discomfort. So, on today's Coach Up, Clay revisits a conversation with Molly Seidel, where she gives insight into how she trained her brain to willingly go into the danger zone where it's uncomfortable and "learning to stay mentally strong when it just sucks." It's a skill we all need not just for our workouts, but for our lives.If you are enjoying FAREWELL, the best way you can support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing is to leave a review or share the show with a friend. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In October 2022, many people witnessed triathlete Chelsea Sodaro, in her first time running the race, become the first American woman to win the Ironman World Championship in Kona. What they didn't see was that, in the months leading up to the race, she was learning how to balance motherhood and training, and struggling with intense OCD and anxiety. Today's episode is about that: the things we don't see. Because, in the world of performance, a lot of the focus goes to success and achievement—and not so much the difficulties high-performers are working through to accomplish those successes and achievements. We celebrate the "toughness" and not so much the vulnerability. But today, Chelsea goes deep not just on the things you might expect to hear from an Ironman World Champion - how she thinks about setting goals, the mantras she writes on her mirror, what her pain cave is like - but on the pains and mental health struggles that an Ironman World Champ might just as easily keep in the dark. By doing so, she shows what real toughness looks like.If you are enjoying FAREWELL, the best way you can support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing is to leave a review or share the show with a friend. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"You probably grew up with motivation being super important: 'Think positive. Get hyped. Find inspiration. Ride your bliss,'" says Brad Stulberg, on this week's Coach Up. "And that's great—except for the 98 percent of days where you're not super hyped and motivated." On those days, when you need a little extra oomph, you might want to use a psychological tool known as behavioral activation, which Brad details on today's episode. Plus: how to know when you have the type of fatigue that will respond to rest, and when you have fatigue that will respond to action. If you are enjoying FAREWELL, the best way you can support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing is to leave a review or share the show with a friend. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you ever feel like you've got too much to do and not enough time to do it? Welcome to one of the enduring sensations of existing and working in a very noisy world . (We feel it, too.) On today's roundtable, Brad, Steve, and Clay discuss how we got here, why the sense of task overwhelm is a particularly modern affliction, and the strategies they use to deal with it, like prioritizing, doing good enough work, and understanding what's truly urgent (versus what just seems urgent).If you are enjoying FAREWELL, the best way you can support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing is to leave a review or share the show with a friend. Thanks!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503 Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.