Lessons from Mentors

• A mentor is a source of wisdom, teaching and support who takes a long-term view of your growth and development.

• A mentor helps you see the destination but does not give you a detailed map to find your way.

• A mentor encourages, validates and affirms rather than instruct or monitor your daily performance.

In this Chapter, I honor my mentors’ contributions to my life and career. They are few and select ones, each one of them having shifted my worldview, perspectives and performance in significant ways.

Gustavo Raitzin

Gustavo Raitzin is my best friend and a personal mentor with whom I have the deepest trust. We grew up in Buenos Aires and we both emigrated in the 1980s. He’s now a Swiss citizen living in Geneva and Zurich, with four adult children.

The first time I saw Gustavo was at our tennis club when I was a teenager. I was practicing with a friend and he was playing with his brother and sister in a nearby court, testing a new Tensor metal racquet his father had brought him from the United States. We crossed later in a corridor and I asked him to see it. He asked me if I thought it was good and I said yes. After that, I didn’t see him again for a long time but I remembered the encounter. In those days, my tennis friends and I considered racquets a kind of currency, a status symbol and a way to engage with others, like car fans do.

When he was 20, he approached me and asked me to teach him tennis. He had been watching me play with my brother on a winter Saturday afternoon. The club was almost empty. As an amateur player, I could not to teach for money at the club. Decisively, Gustavo wrote me a check on the spot, told me to "figure it out" and said he could do it on his afternoon off that week. Over a couple of months, I taught him secretly in the backcourts, to avoid any questions.

Gustavo and I were neighbors, we had lived one block away from each other but we didn’t know it. As we discovered we had similar views and interests, we spent more time in and out of the tennis court and our friendship grew. I learned he studied Law at night and worked at Coca-Cola. He had his own apartment a few blocks away. He had driven a taxi for a while and had collected fantastic stories from his colorful Buenos Aires’ passengers.

His father had died recently and he was trying to figure out how to support his mother emotionally and financially. His father was a lawyer who had been Minister of Public Health and later director at Coca-Cola for the South American region. During the dictatorships, the revolutionaries threatened Coca-Cola executives’ lives and his family, moving to Rio de Janeiro and later Miami. His mother had double nationality (Argentine/British) and worked as an English teacher and a director at a prestigious all-girls school located in the block where I lived. His father’s family was Jewish and his mother’s was Protestant with a Jewish mother. He had been educated in neither tradition, but felt a strong commitment to his Jewish roots during his military service under the dictatorships. The officers took pleasure in singling him out and he experienced the blunt of their deep-rooted anti-Semitism.

At that time, I was struggling to study Medicine while attempting to process the impact of the massacre at St. Patrick’s church. Gustavo had a sophisticated and eclectic taste that started to rub off on me. He knew many interesting people in many places. Through him, I learned about jazz, sartorial elegance, where to go in Europe in my solo trip in 1981, and where the best tearooms were in Buenos Aires. He was generous and protective when I had serious trouble. He was also ambitious and strategically savvy. From Coca-Cola, he moved to Deustche Bank and later to Citibank, where he took a higher post at headquarters. There, he showed management that he could generate a large percentage of their revenues by getting the trust of many loyal customers.

IMAGINE

In March 1983, we made a pact: we would leave Argentina and meet again after three years on Madison Avenue to celebrate our independence and success. Gustavo negotiated a deal with Citibank by which he would end up in New York City. He left a year before me. In April 1985, I landed in Hilton Head Island and made plans to meet. We finally met at a Third Avenue pizza place for a quick lunch, but it mattered a great deal to us. We focused on the open road.

During another visit to New York City and a short stay at his apartment near Broadway, I remember him feeling tired after a particularly tough day and telling me: “Today, I figured out that if I apply the simple rule of three to most problems at the office, I’m ahead of everybody else.” He also learned that if he would pick up the phone book and make a direct call to the source of the information he needed, he would get it faster than his colleagues and their secretaries. They would waste time figuring out who knew who and where. He found these issues baffling, as they contradicted the myth of American efficiency he grew up to admire.

IMPROVE

Thanks to his intelligence, people's skills and determination, he climbed the corporate ladder and moved to Switzerland to work at Citibank’s Private Banking division in Zurich. By then, he was married to Anna and had a 2-year old daughter, Eugenia. I managed to be in Zurich with them during their first weeks. It was wonderful to discover Zurich together the northeast of Switzerland by car on weekends. A few years later, he joined Chase Bank and later Union Bancaire Privee, both in Geneva. They moved into a beautiful apartment at Frontenex, from where we could walk to the Parc de la Grange and Lake Leman. His daughter Sarah and his son Michael were born during that period.

When he joined ABN AMRO Private Banking in 1999, he was in Miami and we organized an off-site event for the Latin American division. In a conversation with his mother, Gustavo coined the theme for it: “Beyond Personal Best - Value the individual, Strengthen the team.” This slogan defined his philosophy and the participants adopted it as their rallying cry to improve the division’s culture, collaboration and results.

INSPIRE

In 2000, he called me from Zurich, where he had joined ABN AMRO Private Banking Switzerland. I was stranded in Houston, with no clear future in sight, as the start-up I had joined a few months before was floundering and had let me go. Gustavo said he could now determine the strategy for his division and wanted me to organize an off-site event in which all regions of the Swiss organization would be together for the first time at the Victoria Jungfrau Hotel in Interlaken. He had moved to another apartment in Geneva near Parc Albert Bertrand where his son Ben was born. It was the start of a new life and the realization of the ideal situation we envisioned back in Buenos Aires: to enjoy putting our best abilities to work in innovative ways.

I started traveling to Zurich regularly and oversaw the meeting's organization, in which I gave a keynote presentation sharing my experiences with Peak Performers in sports. The event was a resounding success for all and provided me with many opportunities to collaborate with Gustavo's strategic objectives, as well as meeting excellent professionals. In their online evaluations, the participants repeatedly mentioned the emotional high they had felt, as well as a sense of pride and possibilities.

The Interlaken off-site opened the door to more opportunities to build a Peak Performance culture in Gustavo’s division. His leadership and the loyalty of his team drove them to success, not without obstacles, as the internal politics and the external pressures of the market constantly created hurdles they had to sort out. Thanks to his ability to think creatively, he gained a reputation as a “turnaround artist” which would be valuable to him to shift corporate environments.

During an encounter in Miami, Gustavo voiced what I consider an accurate definition of our collaboration over the years in the Swiss private banking world: “We are chameleons, we don’t think like most people. We sense the environment and quickly draft a way forward.” An example of this is his remark during a board meeting after an extended discussion about strategy, where he asked his colleagues “What’s the decision?” One of them answered: “We already took it. We talked about it.” “That’s seeking consensus, not making a decision. So, what is the decision?” The difference between motion and direction, indispensable to execute. His leadership profile is “The Trailblazer,” seeing what’s possible ahead of the rest, able to make the dolphin’s visionary leap and recruit the support to build the stepping-stones towards it. Because of my profile as an “Early Resolver,” I comfortably fulfilled the role of the interpreter of the vision, the implementer, the internal recruiter of those capable to materialize ideals, all the while playing aikido politics, seeing the blows coming early and moving away from them to get things done.

In 2005, Gustavo joined Bank Julius Baer and soon became a member of the Executive Board. I continued to collaborate with him and the organization through two distinct growth phases: one before the Great Depression and the other one after the bank purchased the international division of Merrill Lynch. In both phases, we addressed the integration of his teams towards a common Vision, Peak Performance and Breakthrough opportunities. Through the years, I’ve heard his collaborators consider Gustavo a great leader, someone who took the time to know them personally and support them as a servant leader (a fashionable leadership term but rarely implemented). What made his leadership style even more necessary was the suicide of his CEO, Alex Widmer, in 2008. No organization recovers easily from such a shocking event, unless there are individuals with the internal fortitude and values to interpret the personal and collective pain for all involved. I saw Gustavo as one of them, as he was close to Widmer and understood how to help everyone mourn and go through the grieving process.

In addition to this tragedy, and because of the global financial crisis and the U.S. attacks on the Swiss private banking system, Gustavo’s leadership took a new, heroic dimension at Julius Baer. For seven years, he defended the institution during major investigations with unprecedented efficiency, trailblazing thinking and effectiveness - and the bank’s reputation and financial standing survived.

The Merrill Lynch integration process alone was a titanic effort, a merger of diametrically opposed banking cultures to create something new and better. Many of the Merrill Lynch employees, used to short-term objectives and rewards, could not adapt to the long-term thinking of the Swiss model and left. Once again, Gustavo proved that even with a small team of loyal professionals, growth could continue at a significant pace by following Breakthrough and adaptation strategies.

IGNITE

By the time Gustavo decided to retire from the banking industry in 2017, he enjoyed the recognition of several dozen executives who had worked closely with him, now in SVP and C-level positions and practicing his leadership style with their own imprint. In my estimation, he created a “school of thought” as a naturalized Swiss, a cultural outsider, a trailblazer and under many testing of circumstances. As a way to encapsulate his leadership experience and start the designing his personal legacy, Gustavo spent 2018 at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, becoming a Fellow and identifying a series of projects that could merit his future attention and investment.

Together, we are setting up the parameters for future collaborations, which might center on Legacy. We sense that our future-focused worldview and experiences in change management and culture development can be used as starting points to create new approaches for new leaders to solve urgent global needs. In addition, Gustavo’s memoirs as a leader will become a book fittingly called “Beyond Personal Best.”

Dennis Van Der Meer

You can start with a racquet and a smile

At the age of six, Dennis fell in love with tennis. The son of missionary parents in Namibia, he first played over a rope his mother strung up with sticks in the desert near Windhoek. After moving to Cape Town, the young player got his first professional lessons, and rapidly progressed to the provincial level. He claims his background of limited equipment, no backdrops, and few tennis balls made him appreciate consistency, and gave him the ability to rally forever with one ball.

Dennis grew up before the professional tennis era, but has had a very long career as a teaching professional. His reputation grew throughout South Africa, and the outside tennis world took note of the young coach. He was invited to visit John Gardiner’s famed Tennis Ranch in Carmel Valley, where other top U.S. coaches noticed him. In 1961, he immigrated to the US to become the head pro of the Berkeley Tennis Club. He coached numerous junior national and world champions, including Margaret Court and Billy Jean King. The Battle of the Sexes with Bobby Riggs started the great tennis boom of the 70’s. Dennis coached both Margaret and Billy Jean in their matches.

From California, he made his way east, purchasing property on Hilton Head Island, which he saw as the perfect place to base his operations. Since 1979, Van Der Meer Tennis has been helping players of all ages and abilities to reach their top potential. Dennis has traveled the world teaching teachers and coaching players at Grand Slams, and making a huge difference in his students’ lives. He was the Founder and President of Van Der Meer TennisUniversity (1973) Founder/ President Emeritus of PTR (Professional Tennis Registry) (1976).

Coach of numerous Grand Slam and National Junior Champions, Dennis Van der Meer’s teaching career has spanned more than 50 years. Among many honors, he received the Tennis Educational Merit Award from the International Hall of Fame (1969)

[Adapted from the Van Der Meer Tennis website]

What I learned from Dennis Van Der Meer

1. Teach with Passion

As tennis teaching pros, we are performers. The tennis court is our stage. We create a framework of activity and excitement in which our students can achieve their goals. Every student is a challenge, a chance to make a difference.

Our currency is positive energy. We energize our students so they feel confident at every step of their development. We do it by using their names, giving minimal corrections and lots of encouragement.

We are passionate motivators. We truly believe we can help any student enjoy the game, regardless of their skill level. We apply a step-by-step, biomechanical approach based on imagery, rather than words, to help their strokes hold under pressure.

2. Become a Tennis Evangelist

We are professional because we profess the values of the game, not because we earn money teaching it. We help people enjoy their hard-earned free time and learn about themselves through practice and competition.

We are the ambassadors of the excellence of the game. Dennis said, "If you are good, tell everyone." We represent the highest standard that many of our students will ever know. We are the guardians of their expectations and aspirations of success.

We are agents of positive change at the individual and collective level: we want every student to bring their family and friends into tennis. "Have racquet, will travel" is our battle cry. We track demographics to find new populations to teach. "Tennis Anyone?" is our middle name. There is always a chance to make one more person smile.

3. Provide Instant Success

The Graduated Length Method, the philosophical core of PTR, helps our students hit many balls from the first minute they're on court. The method consists on starting to play at the shortest distance from the net, holding the racquet closest to the strings. As one succeeds in hitting ten strokes, one can move two steps backwards to play another ten strokes, this time holding the racquet closer to the grip. The progression continues until you find yourself rallying with good form and balance from the baseline. Only success breeds confidence.

Our teaching method gives students a general knowledge of all the strokes from the very first lesson. Unlike the crusty old pro of yesteryear, who taught 100 forehand lessons followed by 100 backhand lessons before teaching the serve, we help our students cover all technical issues in the least amount of time and with the least investment. We play to teach, rather than teach to play.

The student's feeling of "I can do this" is priceless. Dennis taught us to sell the next lesson to create expectation and aspiration in our students. We need to sell programs rather than retailing lessons. Repeat business is the only business, and our longevity in the industry depends on how many of our students call themselves our friends.

4. Leverage Your Talent

Dennis has always modeled professional success, especially in the marketing and promotions areas. Pros with leadership qualities can leverage their efforts to teach more people affordably in the same amount of time. It's better to earn 30% from the effort of 10 pros than to make 100% from your own effort, if that allows you to grow as a company.

Tennis pros must become tennis activists by participating in social and media events. When your face appears on newspapers, magazines and on television, you are putting tennis up front as a social and fitness activity, right there where it belongs.

Media exposure allows you to leverage your promotional efforts. If you want people to remember you when it's time for them to spend their leisure money, you need to be visible. Be prolific and consistent in your message. Own the Tennis category in your region.

5. Be Memorable

As tennis pros, we operate in an experience economy. Our goal is to create energizing memories for our students. We make tennis easy, fun, affordable and a lifetime process of personal growth. We become memorable when we show genuine care for our students' aspirations, but we must also emphasize the entertainment side of the learning process.

We must design our students' experience down to the smallest details. Dennis always used humor at every junction of a lesson: from the introduction, to the diagnostic, to the corrections and the closing. Who can forget Dennis reciting the names of 40 or more students with his back to the video projection while making precise comments on their strokes? What about his dramatizations of mistakes, the crazy stories, the wacky pictures taken all over the world, his magazine articles with celebrities, even his coaching of Billie Jean King at the Battle of the Sexes? Go beyond the court. Make the world your tennis stage.

6. Always Keep Learning

Dennis extracted the essence of technique, tactics and strategy, and integrated them into the simplest components. Responding to the tennis boom that erupted almost three decades ago, he helped thousands of tennis pros meet the demands of the growing market. In the process, he also encouraged pros also encouraged pros to update their knowledge regularly.

Dennis has always kept himself informed on the latest developments in the industry and has never blocked the flow of knowledge toward his students and collaborators. He pioneered research and surrounded himself with experts. He always asked questions and probed beyond apparently sound theories, testing whatever tool that would give teachers and players an advantage.

Dennis has shown tennis pros the importance of having a vision with a very ambitious time horizon. While the majority of pros would worry about what's for dinner, he would be building indoor courts where there were none, opening satellite operations in new markets, traveling to countries where they had never seen a tennis racquet, and learning from people from all lifestyles. He has shown us that we must never be satisfied with what is and that we must always be thinking about what can be.

7. Be Resilient

No great entrepreneur has lived an unobstructed life. During the 1973 oil embargo, Dennis and Billie Jean King lost many of their investments when people stopped traveling to tennis destinations. He was able to rebuild his career and kept an eye on oceanfront development trends, which led him to establish his Hilton Head Island operations. The rest is history. Compared to the majority of the big names in tennis, Dennis' business have been profitable ever since.

When Pat Van der Meer suffered a stroke, Dennis focused on her recovery by using tennis as a rehabilitation tool. Applying the same principles he used to teach thousands of people, he engaged Pat's motor abilities and gently challenged her to use them.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Dennis' resilience became apparent to me when I worked at PTR Headquarters and talked often with his accountant. She was very impressed by his gutsy reaction to whatever obstacles he faced. Dennis always presented a "can do" attitude and sought alternatives. "Don't get into a business you don't understand, but always go for more," was his maxim. Within the parameters of his knowledge and instincts, Dennis rebounded and achieved remarkable transformations by seizing opportunities.

8. Build Bridges

Tennis organizations have not always been as proactive and open-minded as they might seem to be. In years past, I saw several officials try to undermine Dennis' progressive approach. During my international travel, I encountered his declared enemies, people who hid behind the perceived power of their positions. Those "sacred cows" folded one by one, sometimes shamelessly becoming raving fans of Dennis. This is a testimony to Dennis' influence as an agent of positive change. As the saying goes: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."

Dennis built tennis as an essential aspect of a community by participating in Chamber of Commerce meetings, dealing with the tourism and sports infrastructure, and emphasizing mutual collaboration. Today, PTR resonates in many countries thanks to local representatives who understand how to carry out the same efforts in their region. This is proof that Dennis' five fundamental steps have universal appeal:

1. Have a long-term growth strategy

2. Know what you know and explain it simply

3. Develop every process step-by-step

4. Create an expansive network of allies around the world

5. Collect and nurture a database of satisfied customers

6. Leave a path for others to follow

Dennis arrived in the United States from South Africa without much more than a tennis racquet and a smile. From his days as a club pro in California to his current properties on Hilton Head Island, he led by example. Some people may disagree with his management style or his personal views, but no one can dispute that Dennis is a force that has added energy to tennis as a game. He revolutionized the teaching profession and prompted his students to ask themselves, "How far can I go?"

Dennis and the staff at PTR have always emphasized the "family" connection, in a successful attempt to share not only what we know, but also a feeling of global camaraderie. All PTR's promotional and marketing efforts focus on this premise. Tennis is global and we must live and preserve its values. Following in Dennis' footsteps requires vision, courage, and the heart of a teacher.

My Tennis Coaching Manifesto

Thanks to Dennis Van Der Meer’s mentorship, I’ve contributed to the tennis industry worldwide and continue to do so in specific areas such as mental toughness training, innovation and sport technology.

My Tennis Coaching Manifesto below illustrates my coaching values, a distillation of how I live Dennis’ imprint on my teaching career.

Dr. Jim Loehr

I met Dr. Jim Loehr at the TennisUniversity II for tennis coaches in Hilton Head Island in 1986, which he taught at the Van der Meer Tennis Center. I enjoyed the course and started to understand the connection between emotions and performance. As a teenager, I had to learn to curb my perfectionism, frustration and anger to start winning tournaments. In addition to becoming a better athlete through physical training, I studied what the best players were doing from articles in World Tennis and Tennis Magazine and applied it with considerable effectiveness. Yet, I felt my knowledge did not have a unifying core.

When I became a coach, I tried different emotional control techniques but players seemed to reject them as “esoteric.” If they did not relate directly to what was happening within the point, they didn’t care. Tim Gallwey’s best-seller, “The Inner Game of Tennis” was somehow helpful, but not as coherent and pragmatic as Loehr’s approach. The first version of his training techniques showed coaches how to help players manage their level of arousal and offered a core: high positive emotions lead to peak performance. Attaining and maintaining the Ideal Performance State is key. When I shared Loehr’s concepts with players, they understood them and applied them with ease, and they got tangible results.

Jim had been a successful clinical psychologist in Denver, CO, where he ran a large drug rehabilitation clinic. One day, he met with his former basketball coach, who uttered these prophetic words: “Sport psychology is the future.” Jim took a deep look at his life (he had divorced and had three boys) and decided to leave the clinical practice behind, gambling on his love for sports and becoming a trailblazer in a new field. “I starved for a while after that,” Jim told me.

From 1986 to 1988, I saw him several times at the tennis teachers’ International Symposium and enjoyed his lectures. He had already published books and was having success with professional players, such as the Gullikson brothers and Tim Mayotte. During those years, I was traveling back-and-forth to Europe certifying tennis teachers in the UK, Germany, Norway and Spain in the PTR method. After several trips, the European coaches started asking about Jim’s mental toughness techniques. During a flight back to the U.S., and encouraged by having read Dr. Edward de Bono’s book “Tactics,” I decided to pitch an idea to Jim.

He had already moved to Bradenton, FL, where he was in the process of rescuing the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy from their dismal financial situation (there were millions in debt). Bollettieri had agreed to a list of 60 changes Jim demanded beforehand, which would cost approximately $2 million, to change the Academy’s reputation as a boot camp. A few months prior, “CBS 60 Minutes” had done an incisive TV interview that created significant backlash (the wealthy children interviewed did not enjoyed being there). Jim talked to Mark McCormack, the founder of IMG, and he agreed his company to purchase and manage the Academy. Simultaneously, Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Monica Seles and other academy players had started to win bigger tournaments and climb up the world rankings. Sensing market growth, Nike had made a major sponsorship investment and had launched an Agassi-driven apparel line that was breaking sales records.

In March 1988, I invited Jim to lunch during the PTR Symposium and proposed to organize a European speaking tour in November, covering cities where I had influential tennis contacts. It would cost him nothing and I would request payment in U.S. dollars. If I succeeded, he could consider sponsoring me for my Green Card. I shook hands with Jim, spend a month writing a “bible” of sorts with marketing instructions for the Loehr Tour organizers, and signed contracts with them (they would pay me and advance for me to live in Europe and commissions at the end of the tour). Klaus Regnault hosted me in Dusseldorf and together we traveled to Stuttgart and other German cities to promote the event and try to gather sponsors. It was a tough job: I was cold-calling major German companies (in English) and writing hundreds of letters with terrible results. Regardless, I focused on working with representatives in Madrid, Mallorca, London and Stuttgart to ensure that the promotions would yield paying participants.

Every two weeks, I was calling Jim to report on my progress. The woman on the other end of the phone had a fantastic voice and was kind and professional. Her name was Karen, and she always seemed glad to talk to me. In my lonely and obsessive days in Dusseldorf, her voice was soothing, intriguing and made me want to be back in the USA.

The first Loehr European tour was a success, and I joined Jim at the IMG/NBTA in Bradenton, FL, where I met Karen Elsea in person, my future wife. She had started as Bollettieri’s personal assistant and later requested to work with Jim. We became a trio, managing Jim’s workload but also generating articles, videos, lesson plans and promotional pieces to transform his practice into a business.

Jim made a significant effort to persuade IMG executives to hire me (it would be my first salaried position in the U.S.). Bob Kain, director of IMG Tennis agreed and I became the Director of Sport Science Promotions. Within months, I was able to pay for the services of an immigration lawyer (Mindy Rodney) who processed my Work Visa in record time. As I was already planning a second European Tour and the development of Jim’s promotional strategy, Mindy applied for my Green Card right away. I collected letters from a long list of tennis luminaries who provided their kind support.

In 1989 and 1990, we coached the best U.S. tennis players' generation ever on their mental toughness and toured Europe and Japan. Gabriela Sabatini's victory at the 1990 U.S. Open catapulted us to global prominence and brought many more world-class athletes - as well as corporations seeking to understand how to motivate their staff. Our increased visibility came with a hefty price. The internal climate at the IMG/NBTA was toxic, created by Bollettieri’s own cult of personality and the paranoid submissiveness of some of his direct reports. I was never comfortable working there. I do not belong in a macho and authoritarian culture, nor do I agree with dictatorial management obsessed with generating revenue in detriment of delivering value to clients and guaranteeing employee safety. That was my experience then; I do not make a judgement on what might happen now at the IMG Academies.

As the animosity against us grew, Jim and I agreed that I would scout possible locations to move our operations, which I did for almost a year. None of them seemed appropriate, either because of geography, or because of the quality of the facilities or the partners. We found an ally in Dr. Jack Groppel, a good friend of Jim who had built a solid reputation in sport science through the industry, who had been working with the Harry Hopman Academy at Saddlebrook in Wesley Chapel, Florida (north of Tampa) for several years, a landmark training ground for top players.

In January 1991, we formed Loehr-Groppel-Etcheberry Saddlebrook Sport Science where we could capture an international clientele from both sports and corporations. Tom Dempsey, the resort’s owner, invested seed money and gave us office space at two of their condominiums. I decided to live a few steps away from the office to manage the intense workload that our start-up demanded, focusing on international marketing.

That year, I got my Green Card, which made my international traveling easier and allowed me to feel I belonged somewhere after living out of a bag for over a decade. Jim's support of my Immigration process is a gift that can never be repaid. He took a chance on me and trusted my instincts on international business development and promotions with zero-budget approaches - a guerrilla marketing strategy that worked for some time but run into trouble when promotional outlets and publications demanded payment for long-term advertising.

In late 1992, we started to explore the opportunity of building our own facility within Saddlebrook resort, but it proved to be difficult. An investor appeared which led to the creation of The Human Performance Institute by Loehr, Groppel and Etcheberry a few years later in Lake Nona, Orlando.

In 1993, I was offered to manage a large tennis project in Southampton, England through my friend Adrian Rattenbury, which was as appealing as it proved complicated. By then, the internal politics at LGE Saddlebrook Sport Science were increasingly complicated and I decided to make a painful move to England to face a new challenge on my own, doubling my salary to realize the goals of The Haydan Charitable Trust at Match Point Tennis Club.

Jim Loehr and Jack Groppel captained The Human Performance Institute until they sold it to Johnson & Johnson in 2008. They deserve every bit of their success (it was not easy and gut wrenching at times, especially after the September 11, 2001 crisis). Their legacy in the tennis industry is well established and revered. It all started with a handshake: no contract, pure trust. It was an honor to be there at the beginning and an honor to share a great story of friendship through decades.

These are the key lessons I learned working and traveling with Jim Loehr:

• Trust leads to Breakthrough: During our collaboration, I saw Jim get the trust of top athletes by listening deeply and asking probing questions tactfully before attempting to diagnose their situation. He would approach the athlete’s situation without preconceptions, empty-minded, and ready to listen. The way they told their story contained the key to the diagnosis, only later he would perform a few assessments to gain precision. When the athletes felt seen and heard, they started to trust. It was also important to see them in action; the story was only a portion of their reality. When you see the athlete interacting with others, competing or practicing, you can infer other elements necessary to help them design a solution. Dealing with the family and the entourage is also a critical factor to facilitate a positive outcome. Trust came first, and then the outlining of the approach to Breakthrough - and the trust endured. Trust can also save a life. When boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini came to Florida to meet with Jim prior to his WBO Junior Welterweight Title with Hector “Macho” Camacho in 1989, he was preoccupied by two things: he had killed another boxer on the ring, Kim Duk-koo from Korea seven years earlier, and he hadn’t boxed for four years. One night, Jim got a call from Ray at 3:00 am. “Sorry, Jim. I had a negative thought.” Jim asked, “That’s all? That’s why you called me?” Ray responded: “You don’t understand. Inside the ring, a negative thought can get you killed.” The next morning, Jim shared the story starting with: “We tennis players have it so easy compared to boxers.” He was glad that Ray had trusted him to call him in the middle of the night, never mind the reason. We must always honor trust.

• Protect Identity over Achievement: There are instances in sport psychology consulting in which you have to warn a player, coach or parent of the imminent risks jeopardizing the player’s performance or career. Most times, they listen and accept the suggestions to take corrective action. Sometimes, they don’t and the results can be catastrophic. I witnessed several instances in which the person brushed off the warning because of arrogance, pressure from others, contractual agreements or blatant denial. A few of those who ignored the warnings went down in flames, front-page scandal-style. The lesson I took from this is that the identity of the athlete must never be compromised in pursuit of records, money or fame. The integrity of the whole person is more valuable than any envisioned performance and its rewards.

• Use humor everywhere: One of the critical aspects of living in full engagement is the ability to shift emotional states, especially when facing obstacles. Humor is the fastest route to shifting perspectives and finding levity within the absurd. Jim used to give an example during his lectures: “Imagine you are stuck in traffic and, instead of getting annoyed or pounding the horn, you roll down the window and say to the next driver ‘Is this great traffic or what?’” Jim, Karen and I joked around at the office, finding trigger expressions and collecting funny stories to share among ourselves. There was enough crazy to go around us to build a daily portfolio of humor. We frequently had dinner together and we enjoyed imagining absurd situations, frequently about fixing something that seemed impossible to fix (we could have patented several crazy products along the way). We “environmentalized” humor; we enjoyed it everywhere. Traveling through the U.S., Europe and Japan was a blast because we never ran out of acute observations. I will try whatever they are serving in each country, but Jim’s aversion to new dishes became a fantastic source of both laughter and consternation. “I hate squid; find me a plant and bring it here, so I can shove the squid into it,” was just one example. Next thing you know, we are in Greece and they bring an enormous plate full of squid, right in front of him. Then the host puts a fish eye on his plate: “This is the best part, for the guest of honor!” I saw Jim’s skin turn green. We looked at each other; he laughed and then said, seriously, “From now on, I want it written in my tour contracts that I only eat salad and pasta.” The following year, I did exactly that. Humor made a huge difference in how we handled pressure and how we engaged in creative dialogue to forge the way forward as entrepreneurs. I’m confident that when athletes and executives dealt with us they could sense a difference. When you put others at ease right away, you create space for trust.

• Have the courage to be a Trailblazer: Jim once told me that he had a sense of his destiny, that he would be successful by pursuing sport psychology as a trailblazer. From the moment I proposed to him to build his international network, I also had the sense that we were pioneers. As entrepreneurs, we were always concerned about revenue and funding sources, but the continuous success of our athletes and the increasing engagement with corporations reassured us that we were on the right track. We were part of an evolving story, and after Gabriela Sabatini’s victory at the U.S. Open, we realized how much impact it could have. Jim had to make courageous and hard decisions during the growth of his companies for over 20 years. To this day, there are not many experts in the sport science and sport psychology realm with his record of accomplishment and international visibility. I trace the success to the scenario we suggested our athletes to adopt: “Never surrender. Become a great problem solver and solution designer. When problems come your way, say, ‘I love problems. Give me more problems, so I can get better at finding solutions for them.’’’ Another factor is that he surrounded himself with executives who understood both peak performance and resilience at The Human Performance Institute in Orlando, many from the Armed Forces and Law Enforcement agencies.

• Live the Peak Performance Lifestyle: Working with Jim Loehr and seeding the ground for what became a business success story had added benefits for me. First, I wanted to understand how to manage my own emotions under pressure, as I’m a highly excitable person who gets frustrated easily. I wanted to apply the lessons to my own life and improve my skills. I took it as a never-ending, lifelong endeavor in which I have to monitor the key factors that can trigger negative emotions and recover quickly from them. Second, we had to model what we preached, as it was inevitable that questions would arise about how we lived the Peak Performance Lifestyle. In Florida or when traveling, Jim and I made time to exercise regularly. Our first choice was to hit tennis balls and play sets. If we couldn’t we would run up and down the hotel’s stairs or run for at least 30 minutes, hopefully with a nice view. Breaking down the day with movement is essential to fire up the physiology that sustains high energy and positive emotions. We also focused on nutrition and recovery, aiming to protect our sleep hours against the demands of our hosts to participate in late-night social gatherings. My tennis didn’t get better until later, but thanks to Jim’s companionship, I could experience the healthy living patterns we were inviting our clients (and the world, through publications) to adopt. As a result, health ranks high as a value in my life.

Dr. Edward de Bono

Seeking Edward de Bono: a Network of Improbable Connections

I first became aware of Dr. Edward de Bono’s work in 1984 when I participated in a Diners Club International conference on creativity and innovation in Buenos Aires. In 1987, as I was browsing titles at my favorite bookstore in Covent Garden, London, I stumbled on to his Creativity Course published by the BBC. It was not an easy read, but it intrigued me, so I kept at it.

Serendipity intervened in 1992 when I was marketing Dr. Jim Loehr at Saddlebrook Resort in Wesley Chapel, FL. A representative from MCE, the European division of the American Management Association in Brussels, came through the door, asking about our work. She followed up our meeting with an invitation to attend a Serious Creativity Course by Dr. de Bono in Fort Myers. It was a breakthrough opportunity for me, and I sat beside Dr. de Bono at lunch to ask him many questions.

When I arrived to Southampton in 1993 to take on the role of General Manager at Match Point Tennis Club, funded by The Haydan Charitable Trust, I asked to be on Dr. de Bono’s private course at Tessera Island in Venice in May. They agreed and the experience took my understanding of Creativity and Innovation to a superior level. Promostudio International Consultants, founded by Giovanni Vescovo, whose son Manuel was a tennis player, expertly organized the course. Giovanni went out of his way to make me feel at home and we became friends. As the agent for Dr. de Bono, he kept me informed on new opportunities and I did as well, visiting him in Venice in several opportunities afterwards - always a great time.

Giovanni passed away in 2019. Born in Venice, he committed to keeping the international tradition of the island by organizing conferences and workshops with "The Best Brains in the World." Giovanni and Manuel (now in the business) went on to organize several of my speaking presentations in Italy and invited me to participate in their Nobels Colloquia, organized every year in December at the most prestigious venues in Venice. Through them and their kind hospitality (always booking the best hotels and restaurants), I met some of the most interesting intellectual luminaries such as Nobel Laureates, top Professors and Academics and C-level executives of multinational corporations, all of us enthralled by our pilgrimage to Venice and focused on Understanding. I’ve often pinched myself in the middle of extraordinary conversations about topics affecting the world at large with some of the intellectual giants influencing change.

When Edward de Bono came to lecture in Buenos Aires in 1996, I was there producing my theatre play. We had dinner together and swapped stories. He thought that what I was doing was “gutsy.” It was reassuring for me to reveal to him that I was a playwright, as a different facet of my life as a thinker.

I saw him again at every Nobels Colloquia and the highlight of my speaking career was to talk besides him at the Business Management Seminar in 2011. I followed his presentation of Creative Thinking skills with my Peak Performance Management keynote. I will treasure his approval and positive feedback forever. During that visit, we had time to walk around Venice and enjoy “creative” humor during the lavish meals, where I always learned something new.

During one of the Nobels Colloquia, I interviewed Edward on his influence on the business world and the brightest thinkers. These are his revealing answers:

”What I value most is making things happen, like developing software for thinking, seeing people using these processes with success, that to me is a high value, it's a value of achievement, of helping other people and designing something that works."

"I believe that there's a lot that needs to be done in the area of human thinking, where we have done very little for 2,400 years. I believe there's a lot that can be done, and some of the results are very striking. There was the Head of a guidance center who was teaching youngsters too violent to be taught in ordinary schools and he started teaching my thinking and in a 20-year follow up he showed that those youngsters taught thinking the rate of conviction was one sixth of those not taught thinking. So, that's quite a strong effect and the belief that it is possible to have these effects is quite a driving force."

“Regarding Peak Performance, there's always two aspects of my performance. One, is performance in designing thinking, new ideas, new ideas for software thinking and new ideas for specific situations, and if I'm able to do that, that's Peak Performance. Then, there's the other sort of performance when I'm lecturing. For instance, I was talking one time in New Zealand to 7,400 children one afternoon in a big stadium. They are a very difficult audience, they were 6 to 12 years old, and you have to be at your peak to lecture to them, so that's another sort of Peak Performance. There's the designing side, the thinking side and the delivery of performance as a lecturer."

“As far as inspiration sources, I think in the past, when I started, there probably were some influences: the Eastern thinking, traditional Western thinking, but at the moment, no. As things develop, they have their own momentum and as I go further there's more and more that shows itself, more and more that needs to be done, so at the moment I would say there are not any external inspirations."

"My best achievement was to look at human creativity as a behavior of a certain type of information system that's a self-organizing system that makes asymmetric patterns. So, putting creativity, which has always been a mystery that is a matter of talent or inspiration, put it in a logical basis as the behavior of a certain type of information system. And once we can do that, then we can design tools to allow us to get the creative moment deliberately and formally."

"I upgrade my knowledge in dealing with people, in contact with people and experience once sees their needs, what works and what doesn't work. Then, there's certain input from the scientific literature, what's happening in the field of Neurology and so on. But, really, is having opened up the universe of self-organizing systems. Then, being able to work in that universe and develop ideas."

"These things which I design work, there's evidence that they work. The rate at which they get taken up by education systems in other countries is slower that I would wish, but education is a very slow process in changing that. So, in a sense that they are usable, that people have used them, they do affect people. Like the fellow I met in Australia who said he read my book as a young man, changed his thinking and as a result he won a Nobel Prize. So, clearly these things work but the rate at which they are taken up is disappointing."

“What I teach has created opportunities for different people, like teaching unemployed youngsters in England increased the employment rate 500%, so these were great opportunities for those youngsters. Obviously, I've got opportunities to travel and meet people, opportunities to work with different organizations, in that sense."

"The greatest reward is really to get the evidence, to hear how people have changed their lives by reading my work or by using my methods, like the violent youngsters who change or the fellow who won the Nobel Prize. So, in a sense, feedback from people who say 'yes, it changed my life, changed my thinking' and I get that quite a bit of the time."

"Clearly, the lateral thinking techniques allow someone to be creative in a deliberate way rather than just waiting for inspiration and things like the Six Hats allow a group or an individual to explore the subject thoroughly, rather than taking a fixed position and arguing from that. So, these are processes that make a big difference to individuals and to organizations."

"Investment means you can measure what comes out of it and something that comes out of it is income, which is perfectly satisfactory. Other things are seeing people whose lives have been changed or improved as a result of using these methods, so the investment of my effort has those two possible outcomes."

“I use the lateral thinking tools, provocation, random input, and in exploring the subject I might use the Six Hats. So, these are things that I use sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously, but more often deliberately, and they do help."

"These thinking methods need some training. It's not enough just to say "well, I'm aware of them and I'm going to use them.' They do need some systematic training and they need to be used quite deliberately. They are not just attitudes. Attitudes are quite weak in changing human thinking. You need to have specific tools and the will to use them and the skill in using them. Just to have the attitude 'I want to be creative' is of very little help. The attitude to explore a subject is not enough of itself. There is a need for systematic training in the methods and practice in using them."

"My life's mission is to follow what I want to do, to improve human thinking and to make a change in an area where there has been almost no change for 2,400 years"

"When I began, the Six Hats parallel thinking wasn't there. The Lateral Thinking was just starting, and also corporations around the world using the education systems, all that is changed, all that is now there. Also, of course, the feedback from people using things. In the beginning, I would design things but I would have no idea if they would work or not and now I know that they do."

"On my greatest contributions to the world at large, I think the first level is 'thinking about thinking.' I think the American leading Psychology magazine called me 'the father of thinking about thinking,' so the consciously 'thinking about thinking,' the putting of creativity on a logical basis, that's the logical behavior of a self-organizing system, and then also providing an additional method for exploring a subject, which is better than argument. Those are quite large contribution."

"My advice to those seeking Peak Performance is: find something that interests you and then to try to deliver in that area, whether is design, performing or anything else. To really be clear about the area you are operating in and then developing skill and confidence in that area."

Dudley Lynch

The Peculiar Awareness of Being a Dolphin

I got to know about Dudley Lynch in a similar way as I knew of Dr. de Bono. Serendipity intervened, once again, when I was back at my favorite bookstore in Covent Garden, London in 1991. I didn’t know what to buy, so I intentionally put my hand of a shelf and randomly pulled out a book. It was “The Strategy of The Dolphin.” It surprised me that it had large quotes and illustrations. It intrigued me that it was about the mind, breakthrough and the future. I bought it and read it in no time. I underlined it heavily and I re-read it many times to understand it better.

Dudley’s description of how we think, how we see the world and the games we play as Sharks, Carp and Dolphins shifted many of my perceptions. At the time, I endured power struggles that affected my opportunities and my destiny. I swam with sharks. It was also comforting to learn that Dr. Clare Graves had postulated that the evolution of mind is open-ended, that as our values evolve so do our perceptions of the world - and the opportunities we create for ourselves and others. We evolve through levels of values dynamically; our position is not fixed. Our thinking preferences are our “base,” a starting point and an invitation to evolve.

I embraced Dudley’s definition of Breakthrough: it’s thinking with the whole brain. Upgrading our minds might well be our lives’ work. It’s important to identify how we play the game of life: are we Sharks, Carp or Dolphins? As a Dolphin, I seek Breakthrough in everything I do, going beyond limitations and hoping for harmony. Sharks see everything as prey and Carp see themselves as victims. Each situation has a specific set of circumstances and dangers, so we need to learn and practice strategies.

In 1999, I received an email from Dudley offering me a free AssetReport, the cornerstone of his consulting work. I gladly accepted and discovered my thinking preference as an “Early Resolver.” When Dudley organized a 3-day workshop in Texas a few years later, I signed up. It was insightful and gave me the tools to introduce the AssetReport, the BrainMap and the mCircle Instrument to my clients.

In 2004, I had the opportunity to invite Dudley to Venice to an ABN AMRO Private Banking Switzerland event with Dr. Edward de Bono and Richard Saul Wurman. After the event, I interviewed him on his worldview and experiences:

"I’m not a great believer in beliefs because my field of study is brain functioning, and thinking skills, neuroscience and neuroeconomics, and things of that nature, and if we have learned one thing about beliefs is that we shouldn't believe too much in them. Because so many times we don't really know why we believe, what we believe. But, I believe in the importance of people, in building good relationships with them. I believe in the importance of having goals, even if they change. I believe in having a social system that allows you to operate freely and independently as possible. I have beliefs about the importance of a free enterprise system. I'm kinda the late Richard Feynman, the Cal Tech Nobel Prize Physicist. He said 'I'm not actually really sure of anything.' So, it's hard to have beliefs in that kind of context."

"I'm a writer, so you have compelling evidence whether you are performing well or you are not when you are writing. I think probably two peak performances in my writing career, both involve books. One I wrote it incredibly quickly, I'll never understand it, but I wrote a best-selling book called 'The Strategy of the Dolphin' in about two and a half months. It just had an elegance to it and people tell me it has changed lives. That's certainly is peak performance in my career. There is another book that I consider a peak performance. That is 'The Mother of All Minds' and it took two agonizing years. So, peak performances are not always quick, they are not always fast, and I'm not sure you can realize it was a peak performance until after you had the chance to reflect on it. I like Kierkegaard’s comment that 'you understand life by looking backwards but you have to live it going forwards.' I don't think peak performers sit around and go 'Oh, I'm in a Peak Performance.' It's a reflection that comes after the fact.

"I'm not an inspired guy. I just like life. I like living my life. It's frustrating at times, like most people's lives. Maybe that's the answer: I'm inspired by life. In one of my books, I said that one of the most important things to do is to get in advance of life and ride it like a wave. I think the inspiration comes if you are able to do that. I think that's one element of my achieving whatever I've achieved. I have no idea what that means but when I say it, it resonates, so it must mean something."

"My greatest challenge is dealing with the fact that I was born substantially deaf. Whatever I managed to achieve, I've achieved in a world that I don't hear very well. I remember going to a hearing specialist before I went to college and he said 'There's nothing I can do for you. There's no operation or nothing a hearing aid can do.' And he said, 'When you go to college, you need to study something that would be solitary. Be an engineer or an architect, so you don't have to be with people or talk to people.' Well, I become a writer and, to that extent, I followed his advice. However, I'm also a consultant, a speaker and a seminar leader, and that requires constant interaction with people and it's very difficult to do. Sometimes I get frustrated and sometimes I want to quit and sometimes I want to stay. And sometimes I do (quit) if I get exhausted. Somehow, I've learned to integrate that with the help of people around me and understand me. I've gotten to the point I don't hide it. Even though my hair is long enough to cover my hearing aids, people become aware of that very quickly. With their understanding, it's been possible for me to develop in those areas. It's a constant challenge, I'm constantly dealing with it.

"To upgrade my knowledge, I read incessantly and then I write books about things that excite me, and that forces me to explore and learn."

“My expectations for myself were surpassed long ago. I don't know if that means that I have a lack of imagination in the area of personal expectations, or if that means that expectations were built into me and they are part of my life, but there's always something else to do. So, I suppose in that sense I have expectations, but life seems so unpredictable to me, going back to the issue of my hearing loss, I never know what to expect in my world, so it's always a world of new discoveries. From that, you must fashion new expectations. I'm a modest man in the question of expectations but I'm full of them."

"The opportunity created by my work is to be independent. I've been self-employed for more than 30 years. I like that control that it gives me over what my goals can be, how to reach them. Control over my time, control over how I spend it. It's given me a chance to travel. I've been everywhere but Antarctica. Not many people will make that last continent because penguins don't buy a lot of seminars, for some reason, but I've been in all the others and that feeds into my independence. The ability to get around and do it my way has been very important to me."

"Probably what gives me the most satisfaction from who I am and what I do is when somebody tells me that one of my books has changed their life in some fundamental way. I'm always surprised when I hear that, because despite all the elaborate answers that writers may give to why they write books, there's really only one, and if they give you any other answer they are either lying to you or they are not in touch with what's going on. You write a book for yourself. I think that's at the heart of all creative enterprises. If you can't get in touch with that, then it's not a peak performance at the outcome. It's not elegant, it's not compelling, it's not going to happen. I'm surprised when somebody says that I've essentially done for myself was important to their self. When that happens, I'm always sort of startled, but aware that in understanding that and in being able to share that knowledge, the universe changes for me. I can feel it. It's very rewarding and I'm happy that I can play that role in people's lives."

"I'm not a technique person. I never had a course in Peak Performance. I know you can use sports in the teaching of technique, in that way, to improve people's performance, but that's really not me. My life is my technique and, as I live it, I learn. Someone told me the other day: 'You have great peripheral vision,' and I said: "I do?" And then I thought for a minute and I said: 'Yes, I really do.' That's what 'Letting life be your technique' does for you. You watch, and you watch what's going on especially at the edges, and you integrate that into who you are, where you want to go and how you are going to get there. So, I suppose that if I have a technique, that's my technique."

"Deciding what's important and how I should allocate my time and how I should prioritize things, is just natural to me. I was born with it. I a way, I was almost born an adult. That quality irritated adults when I was a child very much, foremost my parents. They found it very difficult to raise me, because I had a sense of what needed to happen in order to enjoy a family life of quality that they simple didn't share and couldn't see, and it was frustrating to me when I would outline what needed to be done, like 'money needed to be handled better, or we needed not to buy this and we needed to do something else.' I was a very irritating child to raise, and I've been a very irritating child for the societies where I've lived to tolerate, and the clients that hired me, sometimes, because of this in-bred ability to flowchart life. I sense where things need to go, what has to happen next. I have a sense of what the possibilities are to get there. I seem to have an unusual sense of what the problem might be, that might arise. I don't predict the future better than anybody else, but I have this natural flowchart-type of talent to sense what you need to be watching for, what you need to prepare for. It's been very useful, it's been lucrative. I sell that talent, but I don't take much credit for it. It was just there, it's part of those combinations that make up who we are from multi-generational family dynamics, to genetic capabilities, to luck, to whatever, but it's there for me."

"I create thinking tools, so I set up my life so lots of information flows through it. Sometimes is people, sometimes is books, sometimes is movies. I watch lots of movies at home now. I have to have closed-caption on a movie because of my hearing impairment and with the developments of the movies I don't have to pick a foreign film that's been dubbed with English subtitles anymore, like I used to. So, information is an important tool for me. I love what the computer has done. Not all the time, but when it works, is wonderful. I'm a publisher as well as a writer and I used to have to take my typed pages on a manual typewriter to a typesetter and wait a matter of days before it was set. Then you had to proofread it and take it back and wait another day or two, to get corrections and you maybe paste them in and all of that now is gone because we have desktop publishing. I have eleven hundred type fonts that I can set type in, correct it, have it printed out almost instantaneously. I never learned to type well. My high school typing teacher let me audit the typing classes, instead of spending all the time to learning to do it properly. Years later, when she found out that I was a writer she said: 'Oh, my goodness, did I make a mistake!' I said: 'Oh, my goodness, did you make mistake!,' because I have to type everything twice usually because I mess it up the first time. I used to drive my college professors crazy. All of that is gone away now because of the computer. I can sit down and make all the mistakes I want to, and not only can I correct them, the computer will find them for me, so I don't lose essay contests anymore because my spelling and my typing is so atrocious. I just turn it over a lower power or a higher power, whatever, it's computerized. So, those tools are important to me."

"Systematic training is important. I know as a consultant, when I go into a corporate environment, or with an individual, the discipline is there. It's evident that a price has been paid. It's costly. Edward de Bono, the creativity expert, has written a book recently in which he says that 'if you don't prepare for the future, if you don't design it, you have to suffer it.' Well, people suffer their future because they don't have the discipline to design it. I like that concept a lot. Once again, I was just born with a lot of discipline built in. I cannot take credit for that. On the other hand, my father was a fundamentalist minister. His value system prized discipline, prized keeping your word, keeping your promises, prized keeping your room clean. I suppose that can translate into keeping your life clean. Discipline is so ordinary for me, I don't think about it. My wife told me the other day: 'You're so disciplined, sometimes it drives me nuts.' She was sweeter in saying it than that. She was saying 'you're so competent that it sometimes drives me crazy.' When I walk into a room, sooner or later, you'll realize 'Mr. Discipline has arrived.' I don't like sloppiness, unless we are having fun or unless we are being creative. I can only tolerate it so long."

"Alfred North Whitehead, the great process philosopher, said that the first thing that is important is 'to be alive,' so I think the first part of my mission is to stay alive as long as possible and in a vital way, and then after that I don't care to be around again. Then, he said it's important to be alive in a satisfactory way, and that's important to me. I mentioned my independence, I like my independence. I like the freedom that comes from it. And then, he said, after you've got that hammered, your mission in life is to increase your satisfaction. All of that works for me. I think my mission in life could be traced through those three channels."

"At the age of sixty four, an awful lot of the fears that I had harbored a long time in life had gone away. I think chronologically you can expect that if you can find yourself on the path of advancing life ahead of you. I don't know if it comes from being more experienced than I used to be, or whether it comes from the fact that you know you are not going to be here forever, and there's so much people can do to you. I lived a wonderful life already; they can't take that away from me. Or, maybe the brain has developed new functions and you sense that these new skills will give you the ability to get out of just every situation you can find, except the one that may eventually end it. But, whatever it is, the fears are gone, to a large extent, to the extent that it frees up a lot of things, including self-confidence, and the willingness to take risks, maybe perform even more often in a peak way. But the fear of God, that's a very different kind of question than it used to be. The fears of walking into a social situation and knowing that the more people there are the noisier it's going to be and the more it's going to limit my ability to participate, it only is a problem for me when I get extremely fatigued, anymore. The fears of being able to accommodate change are greatly diminished, because there's been so much change in my life, and when you get out traveling around the world with a hearing loss and that kind of thing, the challenges and the unexpected are everywhere."

"Most of us, if we are really honest about it, and I encourage people to be honest about things and I encourage myself too, we are all very small frogs in very small ponds. Now, I meet people all the time that think they're 'really something' and that's terrific. You need to think that you're really something. That's the important thing children need to get from their parents. They need to get an understanding they're really something, and they are. Every single living human being is really something, and something every human being needs to understand every time we look through a microscope, that there are things that are a long way from being human beings in nature that are really something. So, we live in a world where things are really something. But, by and large, we are all really small frogs in small ponds and I doubt that I made much of a contribution. When all the things that have happened in this Universe are added up, I don't think I'll be noticed. Sometimes, when talking to people about the games that we play, the value that we bring to something, like 'How do I know the added value that I represent to an enterprise or to an activity,' I say: 'Consider what things are like when you are there, then withdraw yourself and consider how things are like when you are not there.' The difference is the value that you add. When you intellectually go through that enterprise the results are sometimes sobering, because none of us add quite the value, we're all replaceable."

"My advice to those who seek to be Peak Performers is: Pay attention to the language. Pay attention to what you're saying the words 'Peak Performance,' for example. 'Peak' – 'Performance' Peaks are usually at the top. Just the nature of the way the world works, you don't have a peak without a mountain underneath it. Peak Performance is simply the tip, of the mountain, of the iceberg. You don't get to the top of something without having a lot of things underneath it. Nearly every time you see someone doing something that you describe as 'performing at their peak,' being a 'Peak Performer,' it just didn't happen. There is a lifetime of preparation underneath it. They had to start somewhere. They had to have a sense of where they wanted to go and what they wanted to be. They had to have the ability to change in route because, thank goodness, the Universe is not that predictable. If it were, we would be more predictable than we would be comfortable for us. Peak sits at the top of the mountain: the lifetime of preparation, the learning of technique, the discovering of who you are and the development of the understanding of where you want to go, and the expansion of an appreciation of what's going to take to get you there, and the willingness in the finding of a way to have access to what those things are."

Richard Saul Wurman

Richard Saul Wurman has written, designed and published 90 books on wildly divergent topics. Two of these are the notebooks and drawings of architect Louis I. Kahn (1963) and What Will Be Has Always Been (1986), a seminal collection of Kahn’s words. Wurman chaired the IDCA Conference in 1972, the First Federal Design assembly in 1973, and the annual AIA Conference in 1976.

Wurman received both his M. Arch. & B. Arch. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, from where he graduated in 1959 with the highest honors and where he also received Penn Alumni’s 2014 Spirit Award, and was awarded the Arthur Spayed Brooks Gold Medal. He has been awarded several honorary doctorates, Graham Fellowships, a Guggenheim and numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as being the Distinguished Professor of the Practice at Northeastern University. He is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Wurman has also been awarded the Annual Gold Medal in Discourse from Trinity College, Dublin, a Gold Medal from AIGA and Boston Science Museum’s 50th Annual Bradford Washburn Award. He received the Winner of the Best Guide Book Award from London Tourist Board and Convention Bureau in 1987. He is also a Fellow of the AIA and in the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. Wurman also received the Ladislav Sutnar prize for his outstanding performance in the field of fine arts, as well as accepting an invitation to contribute to Genius: 100 Visions of the Future, a project sponsored by the Einstein Legacy Project, which features essays submitted by the 100 greatest innovators, artists, scientists and visionaries of our time. Most recently he was awarded the 2019 Star Award from the IIDA (The Commercial Interior Design Association) in recognition and in celebration of his impact to the field of Interior Design.

Wurman created and chaired the TED conference from 1984 thru 2002, the TEDMED conference from 1995 to 2010, as well as the e.g. and WWW conference. His current projects include Urban Observatory, UnderstandingUnderstanding- a journey through the myriad ways that he and his many muses have created their own idiosyncratic manners of understanding and his latest book entitled Mortality. Wurman lives in Golden Beach, Florida with his wife, novelist Gloria Nagy, and their yellow lab Jacob.

When Richard Saul Wurman learned I was writing this book, he called me and said, “I’ve always told people that the glass is neither half empty nor half full, it has to be the right size. Only then you can start the process of designing your life. You have to know if you want to design it for power, money or fame - or something else. I’m not focused on any them and I don’t believe in happiness. I believe in being interested, so I designed my life for it. The glass is the right size for me.” There you have it: the practical application of “The Glass is Full and Half” by an architect who took on the most difficult design of all: designing his life to satisfy his curiosity. What’s the right size glass for you?

Click on the image below to read my essay on my friendship with Richard and the lessons I’ve learned in my rich conversations with him:

Enrique Pisani

Enrique Pisani has coached First League volleyball teams in Argentina, Italy and Belgium, as well as the Belgian National Team. He is a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst – Integrated Movement Studies Institute Intensive Program IMS, University of Utah (USA) with Janice Meaden, Peggy Hackney, Pamela Schick and Ed Groff.

He has trained in Body-Mind-Centering (Institute for Somatic Movement Studies ISMS –Amsterdam – Netherlands - Jacques van Eijden) and Feldenkrais (Integrative Somatic Movement– Kientalerhof –Switzerland – Josef Della Grotte).

“Nowadays, I am a movement consultant. I chose this pathway for developing my personal and professional activity. It allows me to stay in contact with different contexts and people. I conduct interactive programs for people interested in movement as teachers or movers that want to deepen their embodied knowledge and exploring the area of movement.”

Enrique Pisani taught me everything I know about Theory of Sports Training. His teachings and his thinking approach to develop champions allowed me to excel in the tennis market worldwide.

I met Enrique at the Argentine Catholic University, where he taught a special course for Physical Education teachers on the Theory of Sports Training. My brother Robert and I attended and marveled at the breadth and depth of his content. As tennis pros, we did not know any of the core principles he described. We instantly understood that once we applied Enrique’s teachings to tennis we would have a tremendous advantage in the Argentine market. Our estimate was shortsighted, as Enrique’s teachings helped us succeed internationally as well.

Within a week, I had asked Enrique for an appointment to explain my vision for changing tennis coaching. At that meeting, he invited me to develop a national certification program for P.E. teachers on how to teach tennis in schools without courts, in the gym or in any space. Together with him and my brother Robert, we created a curriculum taught at his University with certification of the Ministry of Education. The fundamental adaptation was to import foam balls from Brazil until the Argentine industry caught up with the need to reduce the speed of the ball for kids.

The blend of exploration and systematic development worked fantastically. The kids were eager to come to the pilot lessons, playing over bikes, boxes, mats and using every available stimulus. The P.E. teachers would guide and monitor rather than teach - it was a “play to learn” approach. The result was one of the most rewarding experiences in my career and the start of a lifelong learning curve with Enrique as my mentor.

During this process, I had the privilege to talk with Arthur Ashe when he came to Buenos Aires as Davis Cup Captain for a U.S. vs. Argentina match. He confirmed the that key element of the program was to let the children ask for advice before providing it, to let them discover strengths and weaknesses through unstructured play before introducing technique. These were his findings when he introduced tennis in New York City public parks in what it became the National Junior Tennis League.

I ended up on national TV for two years, showing the core elements in a program called "Children in Sports," which led to large public clinics with a capable team. Thanks to our experience teaching anywhere, I could teach children on live TV in an empty studio and mobilize the young audience to try the exercises right away.

Enrique Pisani continues to influence me through his current work in body movement, as it’s adaptable to tennis and provides innovative approaches to Breakthrough. I’ve also referred senior executives to work privately with him and the results have been enlightening. Breaking down the body armor and freeing energy, sometimes with the simplest of exercises, it’s of great benefit for those who live under pressure and hold great responsibilities. As their energy flows freely, their leadership improves.

Steve Sullivan

Steve Sullivan started his professional career as a U.S. Army officer and became a Ranger. His business career began as a sales representative. He is an internationally recognized authority on sales, leadership, and performance issues. He is the president of Motivational Resources and the author of four bestselling business books: Selling at Mach 1, Leading at Mach 2, Selling Made Simple and Remember This Titan (on his football coach Bill Yoast, portrayed in the movie “Remember The Titans”). His videos on Selling and Leadership are 1999 Vision Award winners. His thoughts on selling and leadership have been published in scores of periodicals worldwide. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from the University of Florida and a Master’s degree in Systems Management from the University of Southern California.

Steve came into my life energetically, as he always shows up. His videographer in Tampa, FL, who thought I should meet him, accompanied him. From the start, he was generous: he left behind his books and videos as gifts. He understood what I was trying to do at the tech start-ups I was joining at the time and always provided his content and advice free. Steve also represents a paradox for me, as I grew up with strong anti-militaristic sentiments in Argentina and Steve’s directness, humanity and kindness have helped me form a different opinion of those who choose to serve the Armed Forces under the U.S. Constitution.

In 1999, when ABN AMRO Private Banking in Miami invited me to collaborate as a keynote speaker, I introduced Steve as the opening speaker. I knew his message and energy would make an impact. Later, we collaborated at a workshop for my client The Neurological Institute of Charlotte, where he masterfully transformed his presentation into a game with prizes. When I spoke at the Character and Leadership Conference at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO, I suggested they invite Steve, as he could deliver a strong and clear message on Leadership from the unique perspective of the officer who became a successful entrepreneur.

The enduring lesson that Steve has taught me is what he calls Motivational Acceleration. It relates tightly to Peak Performance Training applied to interpersonal relationships, persuasion and sales. The core concept is Influence and he explains it as follows: “Motivational Acceleration is a calculated series of actions that allows you to benchmark the quality of your customer relationships and then implement a program that dramatically improves them at an accelerated pace. As salespersons, we need to motivate buyers to act. In order to accomplish more, a sales representative needs to accelerate the process. Since we have no desire to waste time, energy, or resources, we will only indulge in actions that gain influence.”

“My experience verifies it is the salesman who exerts the most influence over the customer that has the greatest level of success. The order is his or hers based upon factors that have nothing to do with need. Satisfying needs will help you sell, but if you want to become a dominant force, you’ll have to do more.” […] “In any interpersonal relationship, how one individual relates to another is in large part a result of the degree of influence that exists between them. Influence is necessary in getting another individual to act on something. In normal relationships, influence grows over an extended period. It evolves. In Motivationally Accelerated relationships, it materializes.”

He summarizes his views on Peak Performance as follows: “For me, Peak Performance is a dynamic state of being and it ebbs and flows based up the task at hand. I believe Peak Performance should not be viewed as a point on a continuum but rather a measurement of the distance you traveled from where you began. When you understand the relative nature of Peak Performance, the concept becomes less daunting.

When I was in U.S. Army Ranger school I acquired a severe case of Achilles tendonitis in both my heels. Every step resulted in excruciating pain. The conclusion of the Ft. Benning phase of the program is punctuated with a twenty-two mile forced march. I knew that I was incapable of doing it. The plan was to begin the march and shortly thereafter fall out. Soon into the march I realize that every step was a success and brought me closer to the objective in the distance. As with many challenges, the unknown will bring surprises. On this occasion the pain became so bad something was triggered in my brain that shut it off. Instead of each step being worse than the one before it, the numbness that overtook me made each step better than its predecessor. Before long, I felt nothing. I finished the march and once I figure out what was causing the tendonitis I fixed the problem and finished the program two months later.

The fear of failure has been my strongest motivating force to succeed.

Virtually all Peak Performers involves others. Because I do not accept the acceptance of mediocrity it is always challenging for me not to react aggressively to it.

Every journey starts with a step. If that first step is in the wrong direction you have just extended the trip. By taking a systematic approach to accomplishing goals I create a blueprint for want I want to achieve and it is that blueprint that keeps me on course when unforeseen circumstances attempt to alter my path.

View success as a catalyst rather than a goal. If you understand that success builds confidence and confidence is the fuel of Peak Performance, you will attempt to achieve success as quickly as you can. A small success now may prove more beneficial that a big success at some distant juncture.”

The coherence, clarity and practicality of Steve’s sales model has stunned several of my well-informed business clients. They see the truth in it, the focus on building relationships in an honest, empathic and long-lasting way.

Another of Steve’s superpowers is his sense of humor, his true appreciation of people and his passion for traveling. He takes wonderful photos one can use as meditations. He cares about the future of his daughters and son, who excel in their professions. As a mentor, he’s quick to provide actionable feedback succinctly, eager to see me succeed.

Angel Elizondo

Angel Elizondo founded the largest Mime and Body Expression School in the world in Argentina, after working with the legendary Marcel Marceaux and his master Etienne Decroux in France for seven years. A radical visionary, an original and a theater master who taught me invaluable lessons about the body-mind connection, truth seeking and consciousness, which I apply daily in my life and work.

The Argentine military dictatorships persecuted him but he never gave up. Picture this: a Mime confronting the Inquisition Mentality without words, and ultimately winning - the power of the meaningful gesture... Right-wing supporters of the dictatorships would bomb his theaters and harass him on the phone. They would come to his apartment to take him away for interrogations and he would escape through a window and climb down from the building, as in an action movie. Angel represents the prototypical artist fully committed to his mission and his work, who would find every avenue and every way to fund and get his plays done. He’s a calm, gentle man with a powerful fire burning inside, and a strong social and egalitarian conscience.

In the 1980’s, I saw an ad for one of Angel’s presentations and went to listen to him. “A mime that talks, how interesting,” I thought. What he revealed about his method and the use of the subconscious mind intrigued me even more, so I called him the following week. He invited me to his studio, an empty apartment in the center of the city, where he mostly meditated and envisioned new shows, and he showed me the essence of his technique, based on establishing a dialogue with your subconscious as if there’s another person inside you, and he responds.

There’s also an approach to structured learning: “There are probably ten ways of walking in place, like Michael Jackson did in his videos. If I teach you just one, you will never advance, but if I teach you each one of them to seventy percent efficiency, by the time we get back to the first one you will be almost perfect.” I took courses with him to understand better the scope of his work and to find a way to apply it to teaching tennis. I attended several of his performances, where I saw how actors would perform under a state of self-hypnosis to recreate the script. The key lesson from Angel has to do with his experience after returning from France: “In France we could welcome the students into the class and teach technique right away. In Buenos Aires, the level of tension of the people is extraordinary. We needed to do at least thirty minutes of exercises to let them arrive and discharge their tension before they were ready to learn. I would call this ‘taking the old furniture out of the room before you can put the new one.’ It’s absolutely necessary that you read the cultural make up and context where you are teaching or you will get resistance and poor results.” I never forgot his suggestion and it proved correct when I taught children tennis after school hours in a non-technical culture like Argentina. Without letting them discharge, there was only chaos. If they could hit foam balls hard against the wall, scream and laugh, the technical segment was impeccable.

In Angel’s plays, the mimes often talk and sing, they are not a strict application of the traditional “white face” mime, and they do not wear make up. Every night the play might be different, as the actors introduce some aspects of their own psychological state to enrich what’s supposed to happen in the play. I didn’t know it then, but his teachings would coincide in many aspects with my work with Dr. Jim Loehr in sport psychology. In several cases, it would have been useful to have Angel as a consultant to help a tennis player come out of his or her shell and fully engage emotionally in their performance.

One of the insights Angel shared with me was his passion for skiing. “For someone who constantly and obsessively works with his body, skiing is liberating. When I’m on the slopes, I can’t focus on myself; I have to pay attention to the ground, the distance and the landscape. I feel I get out of my body and my mind takes a break. That’s how I get in the zone and train my recovery to get back to the city and deep dive again.”

The day before I left Argentina for good, Angel threw me a farewell party in which I met interesting people: actors, producers and film directors - some of whom had been in exile and could tell me what to expect. I remember a key phrase: “If you don’t return after three years, you will never return.” Later, I understood through a book on the Argentine emigration that cutting the cord between the “here” and “there” as an immigrant is crucial. You cannot live in two emotional spaces at once. Nostalgia is not productive, so I focused on looking forward, on designing future and enjoying every challenge.

Angel and his wife attended the opening of my theatre play at St. Patrick’s church on July 3, 2016. At the end, I told him that he had influenced me to get it done. He was moved, both by my comment and the play. I was both proud and grateful, as I wanted Angel to know how much his truth-seeking teachings meant to me.

Trish and Dwaine Gullett

During our journey, it's important to recognize which encounters and relationships have made a significant contribution to who we have become - especially when we could not foresee how radical and profound the transformation could be, but they did. When we moved to Saddlebrook Resort with Dr. Jim Loehr to join Dr. Jack Groppel and Pat Etcheberry and create LGE Saddlebrook Sport Science, we met Dwaine and Trish Gullett, resort residents and friends of its founder, Tom Dempsey (who first invested in our new company and gave us office space).

Dwaine had retired as the president of Ashland Oil from Kentucky (the Valvoline brand) after spending many years traveling around the world (he was a regular on the Concorde and a true American power broker abroad based in London, where they led an intense social life). From the first minute I met Dwaine at the tennis courts, where he helped daily with the Saddlebrook adults program as a social ambassador, I was impressed by his high positive energy and welcoming attitude. Later, after having shared many moments together, I learned that he had started his career selling shoes in his small town in Kentucky. He went through college and got intrigued by the oil business, earning a sales job at a small distributor. He charmed his way into Exxon and convinced an executive to buy 1% from him. Balancing quality, price and his extraordinary relationship-building skills, Dwaine persuaded the executive to buy 5%, then 10%, 20% and so on overtime. He had developed such trust with the company that its CEO would sit with him and write the contracts by hand, from scratch, not from a boiler plate, to ensure that it would reflect mutual satisfaction.

Fast-forward several years: through his stellar sales performance, ended up as president of an oil company (a most American saga). As a retired senior executive, Dwaine was essential to Saddlebrook Resort's ambiance and development, and to St. Leo's College located nearby, where he sat on the board and implemented outstanding growth plans. When I received an offer to move to England and run a major tennis project, I went to Dwaine for advice. He shared with me the unvarnished truth about the business politics surrounding me, saving my soul from the banality of office squabbles and pointing me towards entrepreneurship. His revelation encouraged me to found my own international company, which I've run since 1993 thanks to that first contract in the UK. Since then, I've always enjoyed sharing my developments with him and getting his sound advice.

My story with Trish belongs to a completely different dimension. I had seen her at the launch of LGE, but I didn't know who she was. She sat beside me one Sunday at a tennis exhibition (I didn't want to be there, I was burned out) and after a few minutes she says, "Oh, my God, you are a writer. You have a big story inside you, you must write." I turned towards her and said, "Excuse me?" She continued: "You need to come with me to playwriting class with Mark Leib on Wednesday. I know where you work. I'll call you." The exhibition ended and we said goodbye. She did call me on Wednesday and said, "We're going tonight." I told her I was not, that I was busy. "Yes, we're going and you have to take me because I don't drive." Trish is intuitively psychic with remarkable powers benefiting hundreds of fortunate individuals, on a one-to-one basis, just like me.

Six years later (on July 3, 1996), my two-act play opened in Buenos Aires (after a staged reading in Tampa) and a year later in London (with a Time Out critique and photo, which ensured three weeks of success). Staging my play in three different countries has touched hundreds of people and provided me with incomparable fulfillment.

Trish is our second mother and a catalyst for many of the enlightening moments in our lives. We laugh our heads off because we share an acute sense of the absurd. We lift each other's spirits by allowing time to unload. As a playwright herself, she has written musicals and trained with some of the best mentors in London and New York. As a philanthropist, she supported Coretta King (Martin Luther King's widow) for decades and facilitated her presentations in a variety of environments. Dwaine and Trish's hearts are big and generous, and their good humor has always revealed it. I've benefited from two different yet transforming pokes disguised as advice, which changed my life in the direction that allowed me to flourish. Great stories are stories of transformation, and often times the protagonist sets his intention on a conquest but the gift lies somewhere else completely - not on money, power or fame - but on friendship.

I once asked Trish how she envisioned the future of the world: "I think that Humanity is going from a point where we have been revolving to one where we are evolving. I rather believe in the fifty percent of those out there who are willing to change the world, like Bill Gates is putting out his monies there, and there is a lot of young people willing to try spirituality, even older people, without the context of religion. So, I rather believe that we are evolving and focus on that, and be our own friend as a world. That's where I see it going. I guess it might seem altruistic, but I rather focus on the things that we are doing well because we are not focusing on them. It's always about what we are doing wrong, and I think the focus should be on 'let's talk about the heroes, let's talk about the strides that we are making forward, because we have enough bad news. I see it that way. I see water shortages and storms occurring, but you see that often tragedies bring people together, you see the Higher Self. We should be looking for the Higher Self in other people. For example, the guy in the car next to me who looks awful. This person might be pulling me out of a car. How much would I love him for that? When you change your perception he becomes a human being... and you change."

Barbara Rawden

At the end of every growth cycle is important to recognize those who helped us, especially when they did so for no apparent reason and changed our outlook on life. I met Barbara Rawden at the Van der Meer Tennis Center in Hilton Head Island, where she was helping run the Pro-Shop. She was kind and funny in every encounter; the teaching pros loved her, as well as the clients from all over the world. She joined the parties and dinners, where her humor made everyone light up and feel comfortable. I don’t remember exactly when she invited me to move in with her and her daughter Stephanie (a student at the time) at the beautiful waterfront home they were renting in Sea Pines, but it was certainly a blessing.

Barbara had been a jazz singer, married a successful chef who went on to build a franchising holding, divorced and moved to the island. At the time, she had a red Porsche 911 that matched her bubbly personality. We had fun together and navigated daily life’s tribulations by talking them through and evaluating decisions. I was able to end my long tennis teaching days relaxing in beautiful surroundings. I started writing and reading useful business books at her oasis, envisioning new possibilities.

She was the president of the Jazz Society, where I had extraordinary experiences and met legends such as Stephane Grapelli, Joe Pass, Makoto Ozone, Joe Jones, Sadao Watanabe, Gary Burton and many others. When she moved to her own custom-built house, her joy was to have “afterglow parties” after the performances and invite her friends to keep on enjoying the music privately with great ones like Tommy Flanagan, whom she loved and stayed at her house. Whenever I would travel, I would find jazz venues and listen to Pat Metheny, Claude Bolling (who loved tennis), Dave Brubeck and many others. She found a genealogy map of jazz made by a German expert and we both bought one, so we could track our preferences.

Every time I returned to Hilton Head, I spent time with Barbara; she always had great stories and we created new ones. During one stay, she put me on the phone with a friend of Joao Gilberto, the father of Bossa Nova, who had driven his also famous wife Astrud to give birth to their son in NYC because Joao would not stop a recording session that evening. This man gave me great insights on the Gilberto family and the world of jazz. Yet, he was just one of the many colorful characters Barbara had attracted over the years.

Barbara's goal was to live life to the fullest surrounded by the music and the people she loved, and she did just that. She was resilient and focused on joy. I’m forever grateful to her for her friendship and for hosting me. Without her support at that time of my life, I might have taken different decisions and my path would have been different. I’m also delighted her daughter Stephanie has achieved tremendous success as a businesswoman. I’m certain it makes Barbara’s heart sing.

Questions on Mentorship:

• Who are your mentors and how did they contribute to your growth?

• What lessons from your mentors have helped you reach a Breakthrough?

• If you are a mentor to others, how do you contribute to their evolution?

• If you don’t have a mentor, what area of your life could benefit most from expert advice?

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