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FAREWELL

Author: The Growth Equation

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FAREWELL, a Growth Equation podcast, is about performance, giving you the proven, evidence-based habits and strategies that, if practiced consistently, will help you do and feel good, cultivate a healthy mind and body, and perform your best on the things you care about most. There will be two episodes per week: one longer episode featuring either an interview between host Clay Skipper and athletes, coaches, psychologists, and authors, among others, or a roundtable between Clay, Brad Stulberg, and Steve Magness, where the three discuss and share insights on news and topics related to performance, health, and wellness; and one shorter episode, called “The Coach Up,” which is basically a 1-on-1 coaching session, explaining, in 10-15 minutes, a performance-related tool or idea and how to apply it to your own life.

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Last week, ESPN's Wright Thompsons 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.
"The sky's the limit." "Shoot for the stars." When it comes to success, we often think in terms of being our absolute best. On today's episode of The Coach Up, Brad Stulberg explains why, if you want to get better, you should focus on your bad and average days—not the good or great ones.Listen and subscribe to FAREWELL now!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.
Let’s be honest: Winter ain't always fun! It’s cold, dark, icy, and often sticks around far longer than we want it to. Even if you’ve moved somewhere warm as a way to permanently escape the frosty months, well, there are winters there, too; times when you or someone you love gets sick, you go through a break-up, or you lose a job. “Everybody winters at one time or another,” writes Katherine May, in her book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. May says that instead of “imagining that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer,” we ought to approach our winters, meteorological and metaphorical, the same way we approach our workouts, our diets, even our spiritual life—as a practice, one that involves a great deal of rest, recovery, and stillness, and an appreciation that the true nature of time is cyclical, not linear. In fact, says May, it’s the practice of wintering that provides a much-needed antidote to a growth- and progress-obsessed culture that is go-go-go and leaves so many of us burnt out, stressed, overwhelmed, and tired all the time. If you're somebody who struggles to slow down, rest, and recover—or you're just somebody who wants to know how to do those things better—this episode’s for you.  Listen and subscribe to FAREWELL now!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  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Growth comes from facing weaknesses, and we learn about those weaknesses from getting feedback. But feedback has a way of raising our defenses. Which means helping others grow by giving feedback—or growing ourselves, by taking feedback—is fraught with challenges. Luckily, Steve Magness's countless years as both an athlete and a coach have earned him some insights into the practice of delivering (and receiving) criticism. On this episode of The Coach Up, he gives you a primer: how to give it, what he thinks about the insult sandwich, and even ways of making feedback resonate with someone whose big ego might be getting in the way. Listen and subscribe to FAREWELL now!iTunes and Apple PodcastsSpotifyAndroidStitcherGot a question, feedback, or ideas for the show? Email clay.growtheq@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at (646) 893-9503Find Brad, Steve, and Clay on Instagram: @bradstulberg, @stevemagness, and @clayskipper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We've always been a country obsessed with happiness. It was, quite literally, built into the promise of America (right there with life and liberty). But maybe you've noticed: the market for happiness content is absolutely booming, which suggests that there's a rather large market of unhappy people out there. It's almost as if our obsession with happiness is inversely correlated to our actual happiness. Why might that be? Steve, Brad, and Clay discuss, unpacking different ideas of happiness (eudaemonic vs. hedonic), how satisfaction changes over time, what the science says about when you can expect to be your happiest, and why it might be helpful to think of happiness as being like a thunderstorm.Listen and subscribe to FAREWELL now!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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When it comes to thinking about how to design your days, weeks, and months, to get done everything you want to get done, we often think in terms of goals and routines. In the long-term, goals give you a North Star to aim towards; in the shorter term, routines help you knock out the tasks you need to do on a daily basis. Sometimes that works great. But sometimes it doesn't. We can feel too loosely connected to a goal that's far away—or too rigidly attached to a routine that, when it gets disrupted, throws off our whole day. So, on today's episode, Brad presents another way of thinking about how to get it all done.Listen and subscribe to FAREWELL now!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.
Over the course of two days, Olympic decathletes participate in ten different track and field events, ranging from pole vault and shot put to long jump and a 1500-meter run. It’s a grueling competition that requires speed, strength, explosiveness and technical ability, which is why, in addition to receiving a gold medal, the winner is also crowned the “best athlete in the world.” Right now, that title belongs to Canada’s Damian Warner, who took home the gold in Tokyo in 2021. On today’s episode, Warner opens up about his journey to becoming a world-class athlete: how he was introduced to the decathlon by his basketball coaches (who became, and are still, his decathlon coaches); how the very same year he started training, 2010, he won silver at the Canadian championships. He also goes deep on his mental and physical approach that has helped him sustain success for over a decade: why stacking consistently good days is more important than having great days; how to focus in a two-day, 10-event competition, including how to move on not just from an event that goes poorly but from an event that goes really well; how he uses visualization and pre-competition routines to anchor himself; and what training during a Covid and having a kid taught him about the importance of being flexible. Listen and subscribe to FAREWELL now!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.
Have you ever noticed that your behavior is sometimes misaligned with your goals? You go to school to learn, or take a job to do meaningful work, or join Instagram to keep up with friends. But instead you end up chasing GPA, money, and followers. It's an increasingly prevalent complication in a society obsessed with metrics, where everything is gamified and measured. On today's episode of The Coach Up, Michael Easter, whose books The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain assess the problems of our modern world, details why this happens, explaining the subtle ways in which metrics can hijack our motivation—and how you can guard against that happening.Listen and subscribe to FAREWELL now!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.
What type of leadership builds a culture of winning and excellence? Is an approach that prioritizes joy, care, and love, more effective than one that's more demanding or authoritarian? Using examples from contemporary sports, and in the wake of the departure of three of the most storied football coaches of all-time—Nick Saban, Bill Belichick, and Pete Caroll—each of whom fostered a unique type of culture, Steve, Brad, and Clay discuss the merits of various coaching styles. You'll learn the importance of psychological safety (and how to cultivate it), the difference between demandingness and responsiveness, and why self-awareness might be the single most important attribute of a leader.Listen and subscribe to FAREWELL now!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 special edition of The Coach Up! In the wake of the Kansas City Chiefs' playoff victory over the Buffalo Bills, Clay revisits a 2020 conversation he had with the Chiefs' head coach, Andy Reid. Coach Reid breaks down what makes Chiefs' quarterback Patrick Mahomes great, and gives an insight into the coaching philosophy that has made him one of the best coaches of all-time. Don't miss these lessons on leadership, focus, and greatness from a future Hall of Famer.Listen and subscribe to FAREWELL now!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.
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Comments (1)

Juliana Masters

Very cool. Love the "small daily efforts build to greater success," and that science has proven it. Goes along with Alma 37:6. Fun to find truth in different places corroborate. Appreciate your work! Had a horrid sciatic in February and determined to find real help and guidance in the health and fitness world... to cut through all the conflicting fads and get to the core. Thank you!

Jul 29th
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