Real Talk About Mental Fitness And Performance Psychology

“Let’s start having those real conversations and really trying to focus on our mental fitness because I feel like for me, that’s the biggest thing. If you have your well-being, you should really try to understand everything about it and how to take care of it.” Episode summary: Today on the show I have Chinazom Sunny Nwabueze who is the Founder of Dreamcatchers Performance and a high-performance leadership coach and behavioral science consultant with BetterUp Inc. Chinazom also created a mental fitness online community, a video chat series, and delivers workshops and presentations on mental fitness. He has amassed over 2,000 hrs of coaching and recently published his first book, ‘Real Talk – A New Approach for Men’s Mental Fitness and Wellbeing’. What to listen for: The timing of Chinazom’s wife being pregnant, him changing careers and moving to another country only months before Covid ravaged the world  The mental fitness Chinazom put himself through to power through and see his vision come to life The importance of culture, love, and our own personal mission How we all relate to stories and actually relate to each other more than we think “I kind of went through crazy transitions. It was all just around the time before I met my wife. I stumbled onto something called performance psychology, which I really, really loved. And someone let me start working with their athletes and I was enjoying it, doing it. And then my wife said to me, why don’t you give this a go and give it a try? So 2018, I left my job and started doing this performance psychology” We must trust our intuition to tell us when it’s time to “jump ship” Why it’s important to have encouragement and love while in a transitional phase of life How we’re not stuck in any area of our life unless we decide we are “So when I got there, I kind of realized I’m going to have to practice what I preach. Because if I’m preaching like, you know, this is what you do. This is how you do pre-performance routines and this is how you perform under pressure. I’m going to be under pressure. So I need to like, yeah, I need to practice what I preach. So that was the first thing of trying to like to understand what would help in my mindset. What would help when things weren’t going my way? I like to say when you get your ass handed to you, how do you take the lesson and then decide, OK, you still need to keep moving forward?” We can’t just preach we must practice what we preach Life doesn’t turn out the way it should or shouldn’t only the way it does and it’s up to us to engage with the flow How Chinazom went through difficulties but had the awareness to open himself up and accept what was happening What to do when everything seems to be crashing down around you “I was so excited, I was so terrified because thinking I don’t even have a work permit. I’m going somewhere where I don’t even have a permit to work and my wife’s about to have a kid. So if I hadn’t made that decision, well I don’t know if I’d be here talking to you.” It’s easy to look back and realize that you made a good or bad decision but it’s difficult to do so in the moment What it was like for Chinazom to leave the familiarity and take a massive leap in his life How he managed his mindset through changes that have ultimately helped him be a better man, husband, father, and coach Resources: For more stories on accepting your current situation and growing through it all check out Episode #19 Keep Moving with Eric Hemati as well as