--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have an awesome episode. Just flat awesome. Our guest is Todd Stottlemyre. Todd Stottlemyre was a professional baseball player, won multiple World Series championships, most notably the Toronto Championships back in '92 and '93. Won double-digit games, I think nine out of his 15-year career, maybe more. Definitely had a 15-win season, four or five shutouts. I mean, Todd Stottlemyre was an absolute stud as a baseball player.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When someone from his PR team reached out to me about being on the show, I jumped at it. Todd's on the show because he wrote a book called *The Observer*. But it's not like your normal professional athlete memoir. In fact, it's nothing like your average professional athlete memoir. It's actually a fable. It's a story. It's a narrative in which the lead character is actually a female. And it's really interesting.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What Todd has done with this is weave in the life lessons that he learned growing up. He grew up at Yankee Stadium. He knew Yogi Berra. He knew Mickey Mantle. This is a second-generation baseball family, the Stottlemyres. Actually, Todd and his father were the first father-son duo to win 300 games in the MLB. With that experience comes a lot of highs, a lot of lows. And it's not just sports stuff. Despite all his success on the field, the home life for Todd hasn't always been the best. What he does with this book is weave through this narrative and fable of a female business executive and the things that she faces. But the situations, the feelings, the emotions, the challenges are really his stuff. Man, it's just so introspective. I was like, this is a guy I got to talk to. He ended up being absolutely tremendous. I just enjoyed this conversation so much. I think you will enjoy it as well.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I hope you'll connect with Todd and maybe get the book if you want to give it a read, especially if you're a baseball fan. I think you'll love it because to see the challenges that this woman faces in the book, knowing that these are a lot of the things that Todd faced in his own career, I think it's really cool stuff.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, I've got to give a shout out to the people that make this podcast possible. Today I want to talk about Donna for Agents. I did a webinar with Matt Namoli and Ron Scheuer from Donna. Ron's from Donna. I really like Ron. We did that for IOA a couple weeks ago. Paradiso, I was on a webinar with him talking about Donna because I believe in this product so much. I would be talking about Donna whether they were a sponsor or not. In fact, it was that I was so enamored by Donna that drove me to say to them, "Hey guys, why don't you be a sponsor of the show?" Because this thing is game changing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's taking the data that's in your agency management system and putting it to work for you. It's not just pretty numbers on a page. We're talking about actionable items, pulling out opportunities that you don't know exist in your book of business. Like finding clients who have motorcycles or second homes or business owners that maybe own a building or have something else, a commercial client that have other insurable risks that aren't in your book of business. That's real money. Not to mention their adaptation to what many people have started talking about NPS and that promoter score. They have something called a centimeter score, which is basically a real time tracking of your client's sentiment for your agency based on their text communications or email communications or phone communications, all at a very accessible price.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think what Donna is doing is really the future for many of you listening to this because you wouldn't be listening to the show if you weren't interested in new cool stuff. So check Donna out. Google "Donna for agents." Put that right in your Google machine. Donna for agents. I think you're absolutely going to love this product. I've let this promo go on for probably a little too long, but it's because I believe in Donna. I think that this tool, guys, I called Tarmica. Tarmica is a game changer. I called it all the way back in February. I called Tarmica. You have to get on this tool. I wouldn't steer you wrong. Donna's a tool you got to be part of. I'm in as a client. And obviously, I enjoy talking about them as well because I love the whole data concept. All right, this has gone on way too long. But get Donna. Here comes Todd Stottlemyre. You're going to love this episode. Let's do it.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: I appreciate you having me on for sure.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Cool, cool. So I have to say this and get this out of the way. I'm sure you get this a lot. I was a college baseball player. So I watched you play. I think it's cool. You're the first pro ball player that I've ever had on the show. I've had a couple professional football players on, but you're the first baseball player. If it's okay with you, I just have a couple questions I would love to ask you in that arena first before we get into the book stuff, just because I don't get to talk to many pro guys very often on the show.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: Of course.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Here's my very first question. Maybe this isn't where most people would start, but I'm really interested in this. You have this tremendous career. I think it was 37 when you finally retired. You hit 15 game winner, World Series championships, done just about everything you could do. Three or four shutouts? You played at the highest level. Then you hit 37 and it's time to move on to the next phase of your life. I know even as a college player, and then I played some semi-pro, which is basically like bars, pay for your stuff post-college, when it was time to hang them up and move on to the next thing, I really struggled. There's just something about sports and how in those moments, your complete adrenaline, complete focus. Then you go into the office environment or the work environment, and it's just not the same. You can't get back to that place. For someone who has played at that level for so long, how did you acclimate yourself? How did you put yourself into being successful? You have your own investment fund, you were a successful financial asset manager after a career. How did you make that transition?
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: So tough. First of all, for me, I think it was a little easier from a transition standpoint because I was running into injuries. I was having a hard time staying on the field, and I truly felt like I'd left it all out on the field. I didn't have anything left in my tank. The problem with a lot of guys in professional sports is when they get to the end or when they're done, they don't think they're done, but no one wants them. That becomes very difficult because this thing they've been doing their whole life, from a kid working up to it, they still feel like they can play and perform. I didn't have that. I had something different where injuries really started to take their toll on my body, and I knew it was over.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: The transition into the next thing, I didn't know the next thing. I didn't have a plan. Fortunately, the economics of our financial whereabouts, because I was so overpaid in the game, and we were great stewards, we were basically financially free. Because of that, I could take my time. Here's the biggest thing that I've found out: the difference between sports and business or having a job. In sports, it's an immediate response if you do well. It's also an immediate response if you don't do well, because there's a crowd. They're either cheering for you or they're booing you. In business or having a job, it doesn't really work that way. It's not like, "Hey, I had a great meeting." It's like I don't have anyone responding. Sometimes you don't know if that meeting was productive for another month or another quarter. So you didn't get the immediate response of either doing well or doing poor. I think that's the biggest difference between sports and business, or sports and having a job, and sports and life. Although I feel that team sports really reflect business. I believe they are very, very similar in a lot of different ways.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I completely agree. I feel blessed. I was a football and a baseball player my whole life. Played in college. I consider that experience to be able to have as much as I did such a blessing for the next phase of my life, because it teaches you trust. It teaches you respect. It teaches you how to operate. On a team, sometimes you can tell when someone has never played team sports. On a sports team where you actually give a hundred percent and everyone is self-aware, you learn self-awareness because if you're striking out every time, or you can't throw the ball over the plate, or in football you can't tackle anybody, you become very aware of that. If your self-awareness isn't up, you kind of get shuffled out of the herd. The rest of the guys aren't going to put up with that. You can tell when people haven't had those experiences.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: You nailed something there: awareness and clarity and being in the present moment. So important. I always tell people, think about how many people go to work and think about vacation. They get on vacation, they think about work. It's really that clarity of being in the present moment and being the best version that you can be. The other thing with sports, and in business, is getting a group of people to pull the same rope, to have the same vision, something that's bigger than themselves. When you see companies or businesses, when you see an assembly of a team of people all working for a common purpose, you see great success. A lot of times the breakdowns are when individuals on the team think their individual performance is more important than the outcome of the game, of the team, or of the business.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: I keep it very simple. I said, "Listen, I was a starting pitcher. I didn't play shortstop. I didn't play center field. My center fielder, he had that. He took responsibility for his individual role on the team for the betterment of the team." In business, you have a support staff, a leading staff, people on the front lines, people in the trenches and in the back. But if everyone individually is very focused and harnessing their role and becoming the best version they can of their role because of what it means to the business or what it means to the team, this is where you start to get peak performance.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How do you get people aligned? In a team format, there's a lot of peer pressure to buy into the system. If someone isn't, it's immediately obvious. In business settings, oftentimes if someone's not bought in, they can kind of hide. It can be more difficult to say, "Okay, Tammy, she's all the way in, but Johnny, he's not." Sometimes it's very difficult to tell. As you've grown in your career and dealt with companies and become a leader in the business world, how do you get people pointing in the same direction?
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: That's awesome. First of all, if I'm the leader of the team or the manager of this group, and I go and share my vision with the rest of the team and tell them what we're going to do this year, you might not get all the buy-in. What's unique about a sports team is everyone goes collectively together, and the vision is always to win a world championship. It's the greatest thing in sports. But when you get to the business aspect of it, and inside sports, there are guys who have individual goals. By the individuals hitting their goals, they help the team win the world championship.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: Now let's go to business. If I'm declaring as the leader of this business the vision and where our company is going to go, that's okay. It becomes great when I come out of the corner office and go to the team players, the people on the team inside my business, and sit down with them. Instead of telling them what their goals are, what if I turned it around and asked the question: "Tell me about your goals. What do you want to accomplish? What do you want to do here at this company?" Then as the leader, my job is to help them hit their goal. By me helping them hit their goal, the mission of the team starts to happen. Now the company, the team, the mission, and the vision, we can start to accomplish those things.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: If I'm the leader, instead of forcing the goals on them, how about if I just say, "Let me figure out what are your goals. What do you want to do? What do you want to accomplish? How do you want to fit in? How do you see yourself on this team? Let me help you become the best version of you at this company, on your job, in your role." By doing this, by me helping you hit your goal, we're going to hit our team goal. The problem is too many times, as leaders, we have these big titles. "Hey, I'm the senior vice president, so it's my job to run this team." Then I start telling my team what we're going to do. Someone on the team might be like, "Sounds great, but I'm not in on that," or "It's easy for you to say we're going to do all the work." You can see all the breakdowns that can happen. It is so much more powerful when I go to the team and say, "What do you want to do? What do you want to accomplish? Let me help you do that here. We believe in you. We're counting on you." I empower that teammate. I empower them to want to dream, to want to do more, to want to become the best version of themselves. That's when my team mission starts to explode.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. A huge issue in my industry, a lot of the people listening to this, is this old world mentality of "I sign your check, just do what I say, because this is your job, and you should just be happy that you have a job. So show up and do it and don't give me any crap." That mentality is starting to change, but it's still pretty pervasive. The insurance industry still believes it's like 1974. They haven't moved into the beyond that. What happens then is you get this belief and philosophy that people don't want to work hard, that it's really tough to find good people, that everyone's kind of out for themselves and looking to hose up your business. It feels like what you just described is exactly where that disconnect is. I'm a human being. I want to sell as much as I can to make my family money. It's the leader's job, if I'm paraphrasing what you said, to align that goal of "I want to sell as much as I can" to what the company needs to be successful. If you can figure out how to do that and get those things running in parallel, that's where the real power is.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: It's the psychology of accepting my message and how am I accepting this message. If I want to get the most out of my team as a leader and I want to be able to empower and encourage them to be independent thinking about what they want to accomplish, and then empower the hell out of them to achieve those results. But if I'm just dictating, that model is broken. You'll see it everywhere, not just in the insurance industry. You see people showing up for work just checking in. If they work nine to five, they don't really work nine to five. They're not all in. The effort's not there. The grit's not there. The discipline's not there. The commitment's not there. The passion is not there. They don't feel like they're living their purpose.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: Most people that are just checking into their job, they checked out by two. But their pay stub says nine to five. By two, they've quit performing in most cases. By three, three thirty, you start to get a lot of water cooler conversations. By five, four thirty, everyone's staring at the clock. At four thirty, they're already planning dinner when they got thirty minutes to produce and to get better at their job. I couldn't even imagine as an athlete being in the seventh inning of a game trying to figure out what I'm going to do after the game. The second my focus goes to something beyond my performance, I start performing very poorly and I'm going to get exposed in the sports world.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I agree with you, man. I want to ask you a question. It's a little off topic, but before it leaves my coconut, I want to make sure I ask it. If this is a lazy question, you can let me know. It's something that's always been interesting to me. When I played any sport, after I got done and kind of thinking back to the times that I played, I would dissect some of the moments where I felt I played the best, where I was at my highest levels. One of the characteristics that I felt was the most common was... Have you ever seen the movie *For Love of the Game* with Kevin Costner? In that movie, he's getting yelled at by all these Yankees fans. He's on Detroit. He has this moment where he says, "Clear the mechanism," which is kind of hokey to me, but the idea was he shuts out. He goes from super loud and they're blowing horns at him and yelling at him to completely calm and quiet. I'm interested since you've literally stood on the mound that the movie is based out of, and you've had 70,000 people both yelling for you and against you, how did you pull yourself into that moment and be as present as you needed to be, as precise as you needed to be in your career? How did you make yourself that focused?
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: They call it getting in the zone. There's some science that talks about getting into flow. It's where you have a hundred percent focus at the task at hand, where you silence and block out literally everything else. When you get that intense on your focus, I can tell you that I have literally pitched in games with sold out crowds, playoff atmosphere, people on their feet yelling and screaming and waving towels. While I stood on the mound, it was as if I was in the stadium all by myself. Can't hear a thing. Literally cannot hear a thing. Literally cannot place a face on a fan or anything else because the focus is so intense on the goal of what we're trying to accomplish. You literally take your performance into a state of flow or getting into the zone. It's where your focus and the intensity and the intention of what you're trying to accomplish silences the rest of the world.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: By the way, this is also where peak performance happens. My father was so good at it. He would get into flow watching a program on television. You could literally stand behind him and yell into his ear, and he would not hear you because he had you so blocked out. He was used to taking his mind and concentration into a state of flow that he could literally get there pretty fast and then stay in it. That state of flow and getting into the zone is a place where you consciously perform at your very best.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Did you have a routine to get there?
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: Absolutely. For me, it started as crazy as it sounds, it started at the time I woke up on game day. As a starting pitcher, you pitch every five days. You certainly couldn't do this every day, you'd be exhausted and worn out. But every five days, by the time I woke up on game day, I got into the habit of not wanting to waste one ounce of energy, mentally, emotionally, or physically. I wanted to store all of my energy for my performance that night at 7:05. One of the ways I protected my energy is I didn't watch any television because I didn't want to emotionally get caught up into anything coming my way. I also didn't have any conversations with anyone. No text, no email. Of course, they didn't have that back then, but no text, no email, no phone calls, no conversations with family.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: I would get to the locker room about noon, seven hours prior to game time. The reason I wanted to get there so early is I wanted to get in my environment that was protected. All of my teammates knew that on game day, I wasn't going to have any conversation. They knew my routine. No conversations. There was no sense even asking me a question. I wasn't going to answer them. I wasn't going to respond. I just went into this place of being very quiet with myself, just getting centered. From noon until 7:05, the routine really started. It was a slow routine because it was a seven-hour period. The last thing I wanted to do was get too high in my focus or intensity at two and waste and deplete energy. Over the course of 15 years, I learned what the perfect routine was for me so that when I hit that mound at game time, mentally, emotionally, from a psychological standpoint, from a biological standpoint, I could get myself into the state of flow, total focus, total concentration, so that I could perform at a peak level that night.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That kind of takes me into the book, because there's some themes in the book that follow a lot of what you're saying. I think it's easy for someone listening to say, "Geez, Todd, I can completely see that for a pro baseball player. But I sell insurance for a living, or I'm an underwriter at an insurance carrier. What is flow really do for me? I got to show up every day and it's kind of monotonous maybe, or feels that way at times. How does that work for me? How do I take that and apply it to my everyday business life to be successful?"
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: I always say there are two or three really important functions that you have to perform on a daily basis. Maybe it's five max. I want to identify when those three to five things are going to happen during my workday. Maybe the first one is at 9:30 or 10 a.m. that morning. I know that going into that, I start preparing mentally. Maybe it's a closing of a contract. I can't have my mind all over the place, being scattered, and not dot the I's and cross the T's, and make a mistake on a contract. If I can identify what those three to five key things are that I got to accomplish today that are the most important part of my day, the most important thing I do that day for my highest performance and for that office and for that team...
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: The other thing is, when there's a gap in time between moments, I need to pull back, rejuvenate a little bit, make sure I gain the clarity. I'm not a big believer in grinding and working 24 hours a day. I think it leads to burnout. For an example for me personally, if I have a meeting at noon and then I'm going to do a podcast at two, and my 12 o'clock meeting is over at one, between one and two I don't want to spend a whole bunch of energy on another subject because I want to make sure I have clarity and awareness and I'm preparing to give my best version of myself on that podcast at two.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: That podcast might be over at two to three. Maybe I have to be on a stage at 7 p.m. that night to speak to a group of entrepreneurs. I want to make sure before I step on that stage, I don't come out of a meeting and go right to the stage. I'm not going to have time to prepare my mind, get clarity, awareness, get totally present, and really sort out where my peak performance is. What are my peak performance thoughts that I want to share with this group? I want to prepare for it. If you don't prepare for a meeting or for an event during the day, the most important things, if you don't prepare when the opportunity shows up, you're going to miss it. When I think of preparation, I think about preparing. An opportunity might pop up because I prepared my mind, because I prepared my emotions, because I've gotten present and I've created this awareness. When the opportunity shows up, I'm ready to act on it. If I did not prepare, I might miss it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I heard two things in there that I think are major keys. I completely agree with you. This idea of building space in your day to let your mind reset or slow down or clarify is something that I struggle with for sure. I'm the kind of person who is, "This task is done. Let's go. What's the next tab open on my computer? Let's start dealing with that task." Then I get to 3:30, 4 o'clock in the afternoon and I'm fried physically and mentally, completely fried, kind of useless for the rest of the day. That doesn't always work well when you've got a seven and five year old at home and they want to play. It impacts your whole day.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I have started, I don't even know if I've done this consciously, but when I feel myself kind of tipping over into that, my COVID office is in my basement. I'll walk upstairs in the house and just do anything. Turn a simple podcast on and just sit there and listen to some podcast about some topic just to reset my brain off of everyday stuff, or just be in silence. Sometimes I just go for drives for 20 minutes around the neighborhood just to pull it back in. I'm really interested in your perspective on this. If you don't take those moments, if it's just constantly full, what I find is when an opportunity does come in out of left field, you can't take advantage of it. You're like, "I got 17 other things going on and my brain can't process the fact that this thing just..." If there's not space in your day, then you've closed yourself off to serendipity. Does that make sense?
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: A couple of things here. You said some valuable things. Number one, I would stress to people, get your days right. You've got to get your days right. If you can get your days right, because a day is nothing more than a miniature version of what your life looks like. Do you want days of chaos and a life of chaos? A life of always being late? A life of never performing at your peak? Get your days right.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: I always compare this to athletes. In spring training, it's two to three hours of practice, very intense and focused. Then the games—football, basketball, baseball—last anywhere from two and a half to four hours. A game doesn't last 12 hours. A surgeon performs surgeries that might last one hour, two hours, three hours. I don't know any surgeons doing 24-hour surgeries. A movie is two to three hours, maybe 90 minutes. The highest performers in the world get really focused, intensify their focus, get into a state of flow, get into the zone. It's 100% attention on the task at hand for short periods—anywhere from 60 minutes up to 180 minutes. But at some point, you're going to start to lose concentration and focus. That's when you need to take a timeout.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: Sometimes a 20-minute break—taking a drive, taking a walk, going to your office, closing your door, putting on music to get re-centered. Once I come out of it and get re-centered, if I have another important meeting and need to perform again, I have to work my way back to that place of peak performance. It's not a light switch. Once I come out of a state of flow, once I come out of the zone, science says it might take 17 to 20 minutes to get back to the same state. As a starting pitcher in Major League Baseball, if I lose my focus for one minute, it could take me 17 minutes to get back. In that 17-minute window, I'm going to get killed on that baseball field.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: It's an ongoing coaching process. The second you feel your mind starting to get distracted, call timeout on yourself. Pull yourself back. Observe where your thoughts have taken you. Are your thoughts driving your emotions? Are your emotions driving your actions? It relates to the book I wrote because it was such a huge focus of mine. It boils down to what your day looks like.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: In the book, I call it the Championship Hour. What do you do the first hour of the day? The alarm goes off, you hit snooze, get another nine or ten minutes, hit it again. Then you race to the shower, throw your clothes on, race out the door because you're going to be late. You're putting on makeup or shaving on the way to work, grabbing a protein bar and eating it in the car. You get to work and your mind, body, and energy are in this craziness. The opposite is getting up and in that first hour preparing and working on your mind, your emotions, your state of being, your physical fitness. Prepare yourself for what's going to happen during the day. I'm not going to be in control of everything that comes at me, but I am in control of that first hour. It becomes a decision and a choice.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that concept. I completely agree with you. I changed the course of my work life about seven years ago. I started getting up at 5 a.m. I would hashtag on Twitter—not for accolades, just as a check for myself. I'd go out into public and timestamp that I'm up. Sometimes I would read, sometimes I'd take a long hot shower to get my brain going, sometimes I'd sit and think, sometimes I'd get into my day a little bit if I was feeling good. Going from waking up at the last minute to 5 a.m.—and 5 a.m. is arbitrary, it's a different number for everybody—has changed my productivity, my mindset, my ability to function throughout the day. I couldn't agree with you more.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: It's so good. So powerful. It's one of the tools. It's that same mindset of "what am I preparing for?" Our days can get crazy and life is going to come at us whether we like it or not. But how do we enter into it? What kind of mindset do we enter the day with? What kind of emotional state, state of being, confidence, preparation? If you take on the day in a hurry, you're going to see craziness, frustration, and overwhelm. Five a.m. works for you. For some people it might be 4 a.m., for others it might be 6 a.m. Start your day with you. You are important. When we don't make ourselves important, when we don't work on us, when we don't grow from the inside out, we miss out on some of life's greatest moments.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to be respectful of your time, so I want to transition these last minutes to talk about the book. This isn't a memoir. It's not the classic book you'd expect from a jock athlete success guy. I started reading it a few days ago at 5 a.m. and I really like it. I love the format—the narrative. How did you come up with the formatting? Tell us a little bit about the book, give everyone the high level, and then how you came up with this format. It feels unexpected in a really positive way.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: I'll answer the second one first. The book started—and a lot of people have said, "Todd, why didn't you just do a memoir?" I think it's a shock that I wrote this fable. The main character is a woman, she has a son, she really looked up to her father. A lot of the story and plots and themes throughout the book were based on true life events of things I went through personally. Why didn't I just do it as a memoir? Why did I build characters and make it a fable? I wanted it to be relatable for every reader. I wanted to strip away the excuses of someone saying, "That's easy for you to say. You lived out your childhood dream. You had great parents. Your playground was Yankee Stadium. You knew Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, all these Hall of Famers."
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: The other reason was I wanted to be vulnerable. It's funny—I can tell a true life event story around the character in the book and point to the character. It allowed me to be more vulnerable, more truthful with the audience. How did I even get to this book? It was 1993. I grew up with my father, a legendary pitcher for the New York Yankees. Growing up at Yankee Stadium, Monument Park being our monkey bars, standing in the outfield grass next to Mickey Mantle—it was a dream. We wanted to follow in our father's footsteps. Fast forward to 1993. I'm a pitcher with the Toronto Blue Jays. We just won our second world championship—'92 and '93. From the outside, you'd think, "This guy lives out his childhood dream, late 20s, making millions, two-time world champion." But the problem was in the winter of '93, I looked in the mirror and couldn't stand the person looking back at me. Outwardly I looked great, but inside there was darkness.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: It stemmed from 12 years prior. I was 15. My little brother was 11, on his third bout of leukemia. The doctors said his only chance for long-term survival was a bone marrow transplant. I happened to be the perfect match. I gave him the bone marrow transplant. My marrow eventually put him into a coma that took his life. Imagine being a parent burying your 11-year-old son. My parents went through hell. It was tragic. I just lost my 11-year-old brother, my best friend. But I left the hospital with two other emotions: hate and guilt. I hated the world because it didn't seem fair. And I felt guilty—my marrow put him into a coma. I started blaming myself.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: I rewired that guilt and hate inside of me. I played that story in my mind and heart over and over until it became who I was. Every time I competed and couldn't control an outcome, hate and guilt would come to the surface—anger, frustration, explosions. It ruined the mastery of that moment. It kept me from being the best version of myself. I got to a place where I wanted help. I believe that for someone to improve, they have to want to improve. I reached out to my guru, a guy named Harvey Dorfman. He wrote *The Mental Game of Baseball*. I called him and said, "Harvey, this is Todd Stottlemyre." He said, "I've been waiting on your call." I didn't even know he knew who I was. I said, "Harvey, I need help." He said, "I know." We booked a two-hour meeting. That meeting lasted 12 hours in a hotel room.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: In the first hour, he asked me, "Would you do it again?" I said, "Do what?" He said, "Would you give that bone marrow transplant to your little brother all over again?" I said, "Man, I'd do it every minute, every hour, every day. I'd do it over." I broke down in tears. He broke me. He got right in my face and said, "Todd, did you already do that?" I said, "Yeah." "Did you do everything you could do?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Todd, you're not God. You didn't kill your little brother. You did everything you could. You need to forgive and let it go." I broke again. It was the first time someone had given me permission to let it go, reminding me that I did everything I could.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: In the last hour, he gave me a seven-day challenge. For the next seven days, I wasn't allowed to respond or react to any stimulus that got my mind or emotions going. If something bothered me, I couldn't react or respond. I could only document. He said, "I need you to observe your thoughts and emotions and document. In seven days, we're going to build a tool chest of principles and models to help you get into peak performance and stay there when you can't control a situation—on the field and off." This was the making of *The Observer*. It was my mess—explosions costing our team games, not being the best version of myself. Because I wanted to be a better human being, it's my message now. I'm 55 today. That happened in 1993. It's been a work in process.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: Inside the story of *The Observer* are over 50 different high-performing principles and models, peak performance ideas. Every one of them changed my life. As the reader goes through the story, they can grab onto a model or principle. If that shoe fits, it could be life-changing. I think there's a better way. If you look at 2020—the hate on social media around politics, race, COVID, business—people's reactions tell you who they are on the inside. That was me. My reactions were horrible, explosive. Those knee-jerk reactions tell you what people are going through inside. My inside needed fixing. It was all about becoming the observer of how I think and how I feel. If you don't like the state you're in, you can change it. There are tools in this book to help you change your state.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I appreciate you sharing that story. I didn't know. That's very meaningful. The timing of the book and that story—2020 exposed a lot of things for a lot of people. It brought up emotions, feelings, events, relationships, beliefs that you hadn't dealt with. It was an uncovering, like a mound of dirt had been pushed off of us, and now we have to deal with all this stuff we buried for so long. It impacts your business life, your family life, your relationships. I firmly believe that our mind and our body are two separate things, and the relationship between them is something we don't spend enough time on. We take for granted that they're the same thing. I don't believe they are. We have to work on that relationship. A lot of these emotions buried down aren't necessarily in your mind—they're buried in your body, stresses and tensions from when you were 15 years old. These concepts and tools help us work through them. It's not easy, but it's worthwhile.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: That's why that first hour of your day, spending time with yourself to take inventory—how do you think, how do you feel about certain things, what would you do differently, what would you change, how can I learn, how can I get better? Without that peace and time working on us, we never get to a place to live out the gifts we've been granted. We've all been given different gifts. It's so powerful when you stand back from yourself. You can lie to a lot of people, but you can't lie to yourself about how you're thinking. You can tell people things are great, but on the inside you're going through turmoil. As we become aware of our thoughts and feelings, we have the power to change them if we don't like them.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: One of my favorite tools in the book is the 180-Degree Mindset. I used it on the mound all the time. The second a negative thought came into my awareness, I would call timeout on myself and say, "No, no, no." What's the opposite of that? What's 180 degrees from that negative thought? A positive thought. I channel my focus on the positive thought, driving my energy and attention toward it, leading to positive feelings and emotions, then positive action. Rewind it: negative thought, focus on it, feel like crap, then actions that back up those bad emotions and thoughts—knee-jerk reactions of hate.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: If you have an opinion about something—political, religious, business—and I'm on the opposite side, something happened in 2020. Instead of trying to understand, my knee-jerk reaction was hate. "Screw you, you're wrong, I can't believe you think that way." That happened all over 2020. I didn't plan the timing of the book. I'm not that smart. But the timing of what we're going through as a nation and a world—I lived that darkness. I lived that "my way or the highway" mentality. Aren't we going through this today? Whatever happened to the Golden Rule? Treat others how you want to be treated. It's crazy. This awareness and clarity of how we're thinking and feeling, being able to stand back from it, spend time with ourselves, and alter our thoughts, emotions, and strategies toward what we want to become—so important.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The book is *The Observer*. You can get it wherever books are sold. I'll have a link in the show notes. You can go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all the places. I highly recommend *The Observer*. For 2021, this is exactly the type of book and concepts needed. We didn't get into the nitty-gritty, but I wanted to show everyone the concepts and who you are and have you talk about them. I didn't want to hear the book—I wanted to hear from you. This has been absolutely tremendous. I appreciate you so much. I hope everyone listening picks this book up. I'm three chapters in and blown away. I'll have it done by the end of the weekend. I'm impressed. I'm so happy for you that this isn't just another memoir from an athlete. This is really good stuff. Thank you.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: Ryan, I appreciate you having me on. You gave me a chance to connect with your audience. This was hell I went through, misery and pain. It was my mess, and it's become my message and my ministry. All I want to do is connect with people who want more, or want something different, or are in a dark place like I was, or just want higher performance. I dedicated my life to this. The first half of my life was about me. I want the second half to be about helping other people achieve everything they want to achieve, perform at their highest levels, and find a place of peace, love, joy, happiness, and fulfillment. Fulfillment is the greatest wealth we can ever discover.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I thank you, man. I appreciate you. I wish you nothing but the best. I hope the book knocks it out of the park. I'll be a huge supporter, and I have a good feeling everyone listening will be as well.
--:-- Todd Stottlemyre: Thank you.
