It’s 7 a.m. on a Tuesday. A three-year-old reaches for a cereal bowl, knocks it over, and milk splashes across the kitchen table. The child starts crying. And the father? He loses it. Voice sharp, jaw tight, he starts yelling. “You have to be more careful!” “Look at the mess you’ve made!”
We’ve all been there. Maybe the dad was running on three hours of sleep. Maybe the toddler had been testing boundaries all week. We could write this off as the kind of moment every exhausted parent experiences.
But this dad isn’t some ordinary guy having a rough morning. He is a highly trained Navy SEAL. He can make split-second decisions under enemy fire. He has led teams through combat situations most of us can’t imagine. And he came undone over spilled cereal.
A Scalpel for Peanut Butter
I came across this story in Dr. Eric Potterat’s Learned Excellence, and it stopped me cold. Dr. Potterat is a performance psychologist who has spent decades working with elite performers, everyone from Navy SEALs and Olympic athletes to professional sports franchises. He understood something about this particular SEAL that the SEAL couldn’t see himself.
He was bringing his combat mindset into the kitchen. As Potterat puts it, that’s like using a scalpel to spread peanut butter. The tool works brilliantly in one context and fails completely in another.
So Potterat gave him something deceptively simple. He called it the toothbrush technique. Every morning before entering the kitchen for breakfast, the SEAL would go to the bathroom and brush his teeth. Those two minutes became a ritual for consciously shifting from warrior mode to dad mode. He’d remind himself that a three-year-old’s developing brain isn’t capable of the precision he demanded from his team. He’d mentally prepare for spills, meltdowns, and the beautiful chaos of family life.
Two minutes. A toothbrush. And a father who learned to be fully present for both roles instead of forcing his family to operate like a military unit.
Skating for the Wrong Audience
The idea that excellence requires knowing which mindset to bring to each moment runs through every chapter of Potterat’s book. But the story that hit me hardest was about Nathan Chen.
February 2018. The Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. Nathan was America’s golden boy of figure skating. The whole world was watching him prepare for his Olympic short program. And then they watched him fall. And fall again. And fall a third time.
By the time it was over, the skater who was supposed to bring home gold for Team USA was sitting in 17th place. His dreams shattered in front of millions of viewers.
What he did next is the remarkable part.
Together, Potterat and Nathan dissected his relationship with the sport. The breakthrough came when Nathan realized he had been skating for his reputation instead of his identity.
The distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Reputation is what other people think about you. It is external validation, media coverage, the weight of meeting strangers’ expectations. When you perform for reputation, you are trying to please an audience that is never satisfied.
Identity is who you are at your core. Your values. Your internal compass. What drives you regardless of who is watching.
Nathan had gotten so caught up in being “America’s golden boy” that he forgot why he fell in love with skating in the first place. He was performing for cameras and commentators, not for the pure joy of expressing his artistry on the ice.
Working with Potterat, Nathan created what’s called a values credo, a clear statement of who he was and why he skated. Not about medals or making commentators happy. About rediscovering his authentic self and focusing on what brought him alive.
When Nathan returned to the Olympics in Beijing in 2022, you could see the difference immediately. Gone was the tight, fearful precision of someone desperate to meet expectations. He skated with freedom and lightness, like someone who knew exactly who he was and why he was there. He won gold. And he did it skating with an authenticity that reminded everyone why they loved the sport.
The Black Box
Potterat’s work didn’t stay in individual sessions. When the Los Angeles Dodgers brought him on as their performance psychologist, he took these principles to a team trying to break a 32-year championship drought.
It’s Game 6 of the World Series. The Dodgers are one win away from their first title since 1988. Three decades of pressure hang heavy in the clubhouse. Previous Dodgers teams had crumbled under exactly this weight. Star players had choked in the moments that mattered most.
But this team had Potterat. Fans obsessed over batting averages and ERA stats. Potterat had been teaching the Dodgers something different, something he calls adversity tolerance, the ability to perform at your peak when everything around you is falling apart.
His most powerful tool was the black box technique. When something goes wrong during a game (a strikeout, an error, a bad call) you don’t analyze it in the moment. You mentally put it in a black box and deal with it later. Your focus stays on the next pitch, the next at-bat.
The technique works against a deep human instinct. When we make a mistake under pressure, our brains want to replay it on a loop. That replay eats focus and tightens muscles. One error compounds into two, then four. The black box interrupts that cycle. Not by ignoring the mistake. By timing the analysis for when it can be productive. After the game, the Dodgers would open those boxes, study what went wrong, and learn from every failure. But never during the ninth inning of a World Series game.
The Dodgers won that World Series, breaking 32 years of frustration. Pitching and hitting obviously mattered. But the mental framework Potterat built gave them something no amount of batting practice could. The ability to stay present when history was pressing down on their shoulders.
The Systems Behind the Moments
Reading Learned Excellence, I kept coming back to a common thread. The SEAL didn’t need to become a different person to be a good father. Nathan Chen didn’t need to become a different skater to win gold. The Dodgers didn’t need a different roster. In every story, the ability was already there. What was missing was a system for managing the mental side of high-pressure moments.
A toothbrush ritual and a values credo. A black box on the dugout shelf. Each technique looks different, but they share a fundamental truth: excellence doesn’t come from grinding harder or wanting it more. It comes from knowing which mindset to bring to each moment and having a deliberate practice for getting there.
I think about this in the context of financial decisions more than I probably should. We all face moments of pressure with money. A market drops and every instinct says sell. Emotions cloud the math on a big purchase. A retirement date starts to feel close and suddenly every choice carries weight you didn’t expect.
We all feel that pressure. The real question is whether we have systems for handling it. Whether we’ve thought in advance about what matters to us and why, so that when the pressure arrives, we’re responding from identity rather than reputation. From preparation rather than panic. Of course, financial decisions involve uncertainty that no mindset technique can eliminate. Markets, tax laws, and personal circumstances all play roles that preparation alone can’t fully address.
The people who perform best under pressure, in Potterat’s experience, have practiced what to do with it. They feel the same fear and doubt as everyone else. They’ve rehearsed what comes next.
That might be the most useful thing I’ve taken from this book. Excellence is a set of skills. Learnable, practicable skills, available to SEALs, skaters, baseball teams, and anyone else willing to build the systems.
What’s your toothbrush technique?
If you’d like to explore how any of this connects to your own financial picture, we’d be glad to talk.
Lifeworks is a registered investment advisor. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial advisor and/or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed herein. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.