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Guest: Dr. Haley Perlus

Haley Perlus’ official site: drhaleyperlus.com

Featured Books “Personal Podium: How to Use Your Mind to Maximize Your Potential in Sport and Life”

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From Burnout to Breakthrough: Resilience & High-Performance Psychology with Dr. Hayley Perlus

• 00:00 Intro: Burnout & performance psychology.


• 01:15 Haley’s ski story → passion for psychology.


• 05:40 Burnout = exhaustion, detachment, low performance.


• 10:00 Recovery is essential, not optional.


• 12:45 Mindset drives resilience & performance.


• 22:00 Tool: swap “but” with “the truth is.”


• 26:30 Champions embrace pressure & responsibility.


• 33:40 Leaders must model recovery at work


• 38:50 Life as sprints: stress + short recovery.


• 45:10 Biggest challenge = confusion; find clarity & commit.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:05:93 )

Welcome to Unstress Health. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Well, today we’re going to dive into something that affects so many of us, burnout, but also explore this world of performance psychology with rising demands in both our personal and professional lives. The pressure to perform can feel relentless. And my guest today is Dr Haley Perlus, and she is an internationally recognized performance psychologist. She’s an author.

She’s been featured on Oprah and ESPN and is a leading voice in mental resilience. Now, together, we’re going to explore what high-performance strategies mean to overcome burnout and sustain wellness. This is a conversation that’s particularly relevant for business leaders, for health professionals, for sporting people. In fact, as I often say, we are all the executives of our own lives, and we are all performing. So, performance psychology is something that is relevant to each and every one of us. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Haley Perlus. Welcome to the show, Haley.

Dr Haley Perlus (00:01:14 )

Thanks, Dr. Ehrlich.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:01:19 )

Dr. is fine, or Ron is fine, please let’s not be too formal here. The whole subject of burnout and resilience in the workplace for individuals and the workplace is something that we’ve explored on this podcast often. But I’m intrigued to know what led you into the field of performance psychology and mental resilience. mean, was there a defining moment or how did you end up where you are now?

Dr Haley Perlus (00:01:41 )

There is a defining moment and it was when I was 12. My first experience was stress and performance psychology. I grew up in Canada and I was a competitive ski racer and a decent one at that. And I was asked to go and compete and represent Canada at the world championships for my age group. And long story short, just before I was about to go and compete, my coach pulled out a hundred Canadian dollar bill placed in front of placed it in front of my face and told me that he had bet on me to win.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:02:18 )

No pressure there.

Dr Haley Perlus (00:02:19 )

No pressure. And then he basically sent me on my way. And in that moment, I now know that I was at an emotional and a mental fork in the road. On one hand, fear, anger, frustration, worry. How could a coach bet on their athlete and then tell them right before she’s about to compete? What if he’s wrong? What if I make a mistake? On the flip side, though, I can feel passion, challenge, competent, excited. If my coach believes in me so much that he’s willing to bet on me, why shouldn’t I believe in myself? Now, I can’t tell you, that

Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:03:00 )

This will go through your mind as a 12 year old. If you did, you’re impressive, even more impressive.

Dr Haley Perlus (00:03:03 )

Right. was going to say, can’t tell you that at 12 years old, I stood there and I said, okay, Haley, you were at an emotional and a mental fork in the road. But I do remember thinking if my coach has high expectations, doesn’t that mean I’m doing something right? And so I did go down that race. did win, which was wonderful. My coach congratulated me, kept the money for himself. But right then and there, he said, it’s amazing what your performance will be like when you get your head straight.

And that was the tip off to this thing called performance psychology and how our minds impact, how we regulate our emotions, how we work through stress. And so I went home at 12 years old and I told my parents I wanted to be a sports psychologist when I grew up.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:03:49 )

Fantastic. mean, you know, we’ve spoken to quite a few organizational psychologists and we’ve spoken to many psychologists, but I love that. You know, that really got my attention performance psychology and I wanted to explore it a little more. And I mean, you’ve used it in in your sport. You’ve used it in sport, but it has relevance to each and every one of us, whatever we’re doing.

Dr Haley Perlus (00:04:16 )

Absolutely. To be honest, I only thought that I would work in sports until I became an adult. And going through all the trials and tribulations, both at work and beyond work, I very quickly realized that this is not just for athletes. And a lot of sports psychology is based on what we’ve learned in industrial psychology and organizational psychology. So there is a great deal of overlap and learning.

So it’s really just how you apply the tools so that someone can actually use them, right? How to apply them so someone can implement them. That’s my main focus. Let’s just do it in a way where someone can use it so that it actually works for them.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:04:57 )

Hmm. I mean, it’s a theme that we follow on this podcast often. And that is the while you may not be able to change the people around you or events in the world, the thing you have most at your disposal is how you think about things. And that is a really powerful tool we we all need to, you know, start using more of. But this is what