Marketing campaigns are frequently derailed by the unexpected. How can we remain both determined and adaptable? In this episode, we follow Dudley Tal Stokes on his journey to the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. He describes how he maintained a visualization of an outcome, while continuing to adjust his process. We hear from Dr Frank Niles and other thought leaders from the field of visualization to discover what the practice is, and how it can be employed in account-based marketing.
[00:00:00] Hiromi: What are you working on right now? Can you picture yourself completing the task? Are you unsure about the next move? In this episode, we continue the story of Tal Stokes as he accepts the assignment to lead the first Jamaican bobsled team to the '88 Olympics in Calgary. We're exploring this practice of visualization in athletics, in business, and in life. This is a podcast about summiting B2B marketing and the account-based mindset. This is Reach.
[00:00:41] We're so glad to have you with us today, and as usual, my name's Hiromi, and with me I have CEO and agency founder Jaycen Thorgeirson.
[00:00:49] Jaycen: Hi, glad to have y'all.
[00:00:51] Hiromi: And chief creative officer Garret Krynski.
[00:00:53] Garret: Nice to be here.
[00:00:56] Jaycen: This story goes really deep to me and Garrett's roots.
[00:00:59] Garret: Yeah. When people ask you, where are you from? oftentimes, especially, you know, in the, in the years surrounding 1988, "Oh, where- where- where do you live?
[00:01:08] "Oh, I live in Calgary."
[00:01:09] "Do you remember the Olympics? Do you remember Cool Runnings?" You know? So it's like-
[00:01:12] Hiromi: Oh, really? Wow.
[00:01:13] Garret: ... a point of reference, and there's pieces of the city in that movie, and you know.
[00:01:18] Hiromi: Yeah, so, for people listening, Garrett, of course is... [laughing] I shouldn't say of course. Garrett is from Canada.
[00:01:25] Jaycen: If you can't tell already.
[00:01:25] Hiromi: Lives in Canada.
[00:01:27] Jaycen: He's on the north side of the continent.
[00:01:29] Hiromi: Obviously. Obviously, he's from Canada. [laughs] But no text.
[00:01:33] Garret: We moved to Calgary in 1989. So imagine the whole Albertan biosphere had had this event, and people were either absolutely infatuated with the whole Olympic idea, and they were still riding that high, or they were completely tired of it.
[00:01:51] Hiromi: Just toast.
[00:01:51] Garret: So literally, individual city dwellers were talking about this story when I was a kid.
[00:01:57] Hiromi: Really? That's amazing.
[00:01:57] Garret: Right, so it's like, I remember some of it, but it didn't stick. And then, you know, '93, Cool Runnings comes out, and it's like, "I live in this city. I can visit this bobsleigh tracks." And then that became the story after that.
[00:02:10] Hiromi: What is Olympic fatigue look like?
[00:02:12] Garret: I think it looks similar to, uh-
[00:02:14] Jaycen: A lot of hotcakes at the Calgary Stampede.
[00:02:17] Garret: [laughs] I can imagine people who live in Anaheim.
[00:02:23] Hiromi: Oh.
[00:02:23] Garret: Probably have the people love Disneyland.
[00:02:26] Hiromi: Yes.
[00:02:26] Garret: Because of the opportunities it brings, because of the tourists. It- it helps their business. And then half the people probably hate Disneyland, right? So, this event with these stories in it either gave people this remarkable hope, and- and optimism, and opportunity, or it absolutely derailed their normal life.
[00:02:45] Hiromi: I can see that that's interesting.
[00:02:47] Jaycen: I'm trying to figure out when we moved to Calgary. Like, maybe '87. But interesting-
[00:02:52] Hiromi: Oh, see, you went through it.
[00:02:53] Jaycen: Well, as a kid, I don't really recall much about the Olympics, or... You know, I recall the movie, and definitely as a teenager I was into snowboarding from 14 to 18 at the Calgary Olympic Park.
[00:03:07] Garret: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
[00:03:08] Jaycen: You could see bobsledder coming down the track, which is such an awesome experience.
[00:03:11] Garret: I remember as a teen snowboarding there, and you ride the chairlift, and you could see the whole bobsled track, luge track.
[00:03:18] Later, they had a thing where in the summer, you could ride, I don't know if it was, like, a bobsled, or, like, a luge, similar thing on wheels that would go down this track without the ice on it, and you could experience the thrill of- of going in this Olympic venue. It was built for the Olympics.
[00:03:35] Hiromi: That is cool. So this was the backdrop for the Jamaican bobsled team's Olympic aspirations. But as Tal describes, there was a lot of ground to cover in a very short period of time before they could be ready to compete.
[00:03:51] Dudley Tal Stokes: So the trials in Jamaica and the selection were conducted by some US-sponsored athletes who have come down for a vacation and to lend their expertise. So they set up the trials and gave their thoughts on the athletes. On the team that was eventually selected, three of us were from the military. I was the ranking officer. Another soldier was Devon Harris, who had a similar background to mine. An officer, attended Sandhurst. The other one was Michael White, the, um, 100 meter champion. Then we had Freddy Powell and Caldwell Allen, two civilians.
[00:04:32] Freddy Powell was chosen for his marketing appeal. He read about the trials in the newspaper, got on his scooter, and rode three hours into Kingston to attend the trials in his street shoes. Caldwell Allen was a- was a high school athlete at the time. So that was the team that was selected to travel and gain first experience of bobsleigh.
[00:04:58] Hiromi: All right, so this is a marketing podcast. Let's talk marketing for just a second. This should sound kind of familiar, right? Let's see we're a meeting, and we start naming fictional characters, and describing their motivations and their attributes. Uh, there's an enigmatic guy from Jamaica. He rides a scooter, and he wears street shoes. Another character is in the military. He's the 100 meter champion, and he's driven by competition. You know, marketers create character studies like this, right? Why do they do that?
[00:05:27] Garret: Yep, instead of just saying, "I'm gonna address everyone in the market," it helps you to go a step deeper. Take your Venn diagrams and hopefully get them more overlapping between messaging and who your audience is.
[00:05:38] Hiromi: Explain that a little bit.
[00:05:40] Garret: So a persona, it's like a character study, right? So before you play a character in the school play. You know, "What are my motivations? And- and- and where did I come from?" That's persona, right?
[00:05:53] Hiromi: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
[00:05:54] Garret: Then the journey map is, okay, now I'm talking about you doing something, you experiencing a problem. You climbing a mountain. So now, with all of that background information of what makes you you, persona, now you go on a journey, and all that background information informs me on what choices you will make on that journey.
[00:06:16] Hiromi: And how does that help you as a marketer? Obviously, this fictional person's not benefiting. How are you benefitting?
[00:06:22] Garret: It's a tool for you to help make decisions. Right? It helps you make a very calculated assumption that now my messaging will resonate. As opposed to, throwing it on a wall, and whatever sticks, we just go with that.
[00:06:33] Jaycen: Yeah, the intention is to understand the people, the behaviors behind the people. We're trying to understand what's going to connect with them. So whether you're on B2C, or you're B2B, you're marketing to many, or you're making to few, trying to get in their- their mindspace. What is going to now connect to the individuals that- that we're seeking to reach?
[00:06:52] Hiromi: Yeah, I mean, it's- it's interesting, right? Because in our last episode, Tal taught us about how he was using visualization to help him to develop his athletic abilities, and as you're describing it, it kind of sounds like marketers are using tools on a regular basis with a similar goal.
[00:07:07] Jaycen: We're doing this, right? In- in certain respects. Visualizing our customers, and you know, what are some of their concerns? And what are some of their challenges? And you know, how can I address these? And how I address them, personas, journey maps, empathy maps. All these things are beneficial tools to helping us start the visualization.
[00:07:32] Dudley Tal Stokes: We were, of course, concerned about potential dangers. But we were at our core a military team. We knew we had a job to do, and we set about doing it. We never held back at any point, which was maybe imprudent, but that was the spirit we take into bobsleigh, and into the Olympic games.
[00:07:54] We traveled to Lake Placid in upstate New York, where we met our coach for the first time, Howard Siler. And he assessed us, and did in fact take us down to the ice hockey rink, and slid around on that for a while, just to get that impression of ice. And then back home, where we trained on a push sled, which we had built. Uh, metal sled on wheels. We practiced the start and our timing in this push sled in front of the [inaudible 00:08:26] in [inaudible 00:08:27], main military base in Kingston, Jamaica.
[00:08:30] So in October, we went to Canada to learn to slide. We walked up to the track first day there and stood behind a big curve. And for the first time, heard a bobsled going through there, through that curve. It really sounded like a fighter jet that had just put on the after burners. I went rumbling by, gone in a flash. That our first real life experience, and it got the adrenaline going.
[00:09:02] Garret: In the movie, in Cool Runnings, you know, they have this scene of them first going on ice, right? And it's actually hilarious. But teaching my kids to skate and watching them on ice for the first time, it's like that scene in Bambi, right? Where the-
[00:09:14] Jaycen: Yeah.
[00:09:15] Garret: ... the baby deer is on the ice, and it's, like, just hearing him think about, you know, the timeline here. October 1987, and the Olympics were in February 1988. And they're first being introduced to the surface of ice. Like, it's- it's- it's actually remarkable how much they had to learn and take in and apply to what they were about to do in such a short period of time.
[00:09:40] Hiromi: I heard this other interview that Devon Harris did, and he was saying, "Yeah, the ice was something we were not familiar with." But he's like, "There's only 16 tracks worldwide at this time." And now there might be more. But back then, Japan, France, Norway. All those countries didn't have a track. So if they wanted to contend, they had to travel to one of those 16 tracks to practice. So when you're not on one of those tracks, what do you do? You- you run. You lift weights. You do other things like that to- to prepare yourself. And he's like, "Those are things that any Jamaican does all the time." So... [laughs] He's like, "You know, aside from the ice, we had just a good a chance as anyone else to do this thing."
[00:10:20] Garret: I think the thing about this story though is just personally, I'm always in this mode. And we have this discussion weekly about, "We've never done this before." And this activation be done in this mode. Oh, can this tactic be applied in this tech? And so I resonate with this story. Like, the whole country had never been involved in the Winter Olympics. And so now they put this idea together, and it, for all intents and purposes, it was absolutely a crazy idea.
[00:10:50] Hiromi: Yeah.
[00:10:50] Garret: But when you start to break it down, it all makes sense.
[00:10:53] Hiromi: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
[00:10:54] Garret: Like, like, the start was really important, so they had athletes. They needed a driver, so they got someone who flew a helicopter, and- and was a pilot. You know, and it's like, they had these rich businessmen who were backing them, and they ha- you know, and it's like the trepidation you might have. Even personally, about trying something new. Going down a path you've never been down before.
[00:11:14] Hiromi: Yeah.
[00:11:14] Garret: And not give up before you try.
[00:11:16] Hiromi: Yeah. It's a good point.
[00:11:19] Dudley Tal Stokes: In bobsleigh, the approach to learning is the same as in flying, where learn that you pull left, instead of a left, you pull of right, instead you'll go right. There are places you shouldn't pull at you start out slow. And in the case of a bobsled, low. There are three or four starts on every bobsleigh run. And the junior start usually is the lowest one, with only a few corners coming after that.
[00:11:43] So we started at the junior start, got the feel for sled and kept moving up the track until finally, the coaches felt we were prepared to go from the top. So we came to the top of the bobsled run, and fairly comfortable. The one thing that I wasn't prepared for is the extra speed, and- and the sheer level of violence from being in a bobsled from the top. And so I jumped in with my helmet comfortably on my head, not too tight. And went off. And by corner four, my helmet had risen up over my eyes. I didn't see a thing for the rest of the trip. And we got to the bottom on our four runners, and I was thinking, "Well, how could this be?"
[00:12:30] Speaker 5: Dudley Stokes, you're the captain of this team. [inaudible 00:12:33], what does [inaudible 00:12:35] about this?
[00:12:35] Dudley Tal Stokes: so to discover the [inaudible 00:12:37] in bobsled, you have to actually do it. The next best thing is to stand by the track and actually watch a bobsledder. And the worst option is to watch it on TV because somehow the TV doesn't capture the speed, and, um, and the violence of the sport. It's very fast, and it's a- a very rough sport. And if you like that sort of thing, uh, [inaudible 00:12:58]. Good for the adrenaline [inaudible 00:13:01].
[00:12:52] So we learn it's better to do your helmet up really tight, so it stays on your head when you start being thrown about.
[00:13:07] Hiromi: Yeah, this feels like a turning point in his understanding of visualization.
[00:13:12] Garret: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
[00:13:12] Hiromi: Didn't we just here in- in our last episode from Dr. Frank Niles, a- about a study in the University of Chicago, where basketball players who visualized and did no practicing did almost as well as players who physically practice? We know that Tal had done tons of visualization before this event. Why is it that his first interaction with his bobsled is a big surprise?
[00:13:39] Jaycen: 'Cause it's the real thing.
[00:13:41] Well, I would say... [laughs]
[00:13:41] Hiromi: Yeah.
[00:13:42] Jaycen: It's like the- there's no... there's no substitute for the real thing. Like, that's probably, as we're discussing a little bit of maybe the challenges that marketers may face in doing this is how close do they get to the real person? The persona stuff helps us to imagine the person, but here's a difference too is that in- in Tal's case of sliding down a track, the track is the exact same, you know?
[00:14:07] Hiromi: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
[00:14:07] Jaycen: So as they go through it, the visualization's gonna get better and better and better. But as we think through individuals, are they exactly the same. Is any two individuals exactly the same? Like, this a challenge, right?
[00:14:21] Garret: So, of course, the Nielsen Norman group is a authority on user experience, design, and Sara Gibbons is one of their designers. She does this video series, and she talks about the difference between sympathy and empathy.
[00:14:34] Sarah Gibbons: Sympathy is the acknowledgement of the suffering of others. Sympathy is often the reaction in the form of sorrow or pity, to the hardship or plight of another person. In UX, sympathy is limited to acknowledging that users are going through something difficult, say a scenario, task, or journey.
[00:14:54] Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to fully understand, mirror, and then share another person's expression, needs, and motivations. In UX, empathy enables us to understand not only our user's immediate frustrations, but also their hopes, fears, abilities, limitations, reasonings, and goals.
[00:15:17] Jaycen: Yeah, she talks about a blind person, right?
[00:15:19] Garret: Yeah. Developing for blind people.
[00:15:21] Jaycen: So, like, blindfolding yourself.
[00:15:23] Garret: Yeah, absolutely. And so that's where it's empathy mapping, we talk about a lot. Really goes beyond recognizing pain, and now understanding why someone is in pain, what they're trying to do to correct it, and then developing the process around solving for that.
[00:15:40] Hiromi: Right, so what you're kinda saying is that visualization is really only valuable when it's based in reality, then? Right, and in Tal's case, he had no real experience to base his previous visualizations on. This was his first experience with a bobsled. So I looked up a- a few quick facts about bobsleigh on the internet, [laughs] so we can help us to visualize what he's being subjected to.
[00:16:02] So apparently, bobsled tracks are just under a mile, typically. And they have at least 15 curves in them. They have these different entry points for training purposes, and that's what he's talking about when he says low. They can be inserted into the track at different points, obviously increasing difficulty as you go up. These sleds have, like, an open back. They're mounted on four runners, and the front set of runners are steered by pulling on these ropes by the driver. And as these sleds go down that track, they can reach up to 90 miles per hour. And around some of these tighter corners, the gravitational force on the riders is five times what you would experience just standing in a normal environment. That's a lot to adjust to.
[00:16:47] Garret: But you can be sure his visualization changed from that point forward. His process had to change at that point forward because now he had new information that was very real. Now he can picture way more.
[00:17:00] Hiromi: Yeah.
[00:17:00] Garret: So I think that's where for us as marketers, the rigidity of personas can be damaging after a certain point, right? Where it's like, "Oh, this personal experience doesn't necessarily align with what this theoretical experience and the persona or the journey map is telling me, so am I so rigid that I can't adapt?"
[00:17:21] Hiromi: Yeah, in Talking to Strangers, the newest Malcolm Gladwell book, he talks about how bad we are at guessing what other people are thinking. We give ourselves credit for being maybe a good judge of character, being able to tell when people are lying, for example. But he makes the point. People will surprise you all the time. Studies show we're only 54% accurate at knowing when someone's lying to them. They cited this example of how these bail judges insisted in looking into people's eyes when they were making their judgments. Bail judges, they have to decide whether someone's a flight risk or not.
[00:17:54] But in a 2017 study by a Harvard economist, they pitted these bail judges against AI. The defendants that the judges gave bail were 25% more likely to go out and commit another crime than those that the computer would have chosen. So we're not that good at guessing. There's room for improvement, right?
[00:18:17] Garret: And I think if that judge knew that person, maybe that rate would change.
[00:18:21] Hiromi: Yeah, that's the key, isn't it? It's not that we can't have a preconception about a matter. But we have to let it change.
[00:18:28] Dudley Tal Stokes: Now, up to this point, George Fitch and William Maloney were financing this whole venture from their own resources. But we flew into Calgary on October 17th, 1987, which is a day that's since gone down as Black Monday, biggest crash on the stock market till that day.
[00:18:49] Speaker 7: October 19th, 1987. Black Monday. The stock market drops a bomb by falling more than 500 points, and the shock waves hit [inaudible 00:18:58].
[00:18:55] Dudley Tal Stokes: When we left Dallas, George Fitch was a millionaire, and by the time we landed in Calgary, he was broke. So the money just wasn't there for us to continue as we did before. We really cut expenses. Went from four rooms down to one. Started getting very comfortable together. We sold t-shirts as a way of raising money to pay our bills. And you quite literally could see the quality of your [inaudible 00:19:26] as you went through the day and watching how t-shirt and sweatshirt sales moved. Perhaps our biggest customers were other bobsled athletes on the track. People coming up to see us.
[00:19:41] Hiromi: Yeah, if Tal were to map out his own journey, certainly selling t-shirts would not have been on that map. It ended up being a very important part of him being able to eat. [laughs] And sustain this- this journey for him. But he would have never put that on the map. And it- it makes us think about another thing that Dr. Frank Niles brought up. When he talked about the two different types of visualization.
[00:20:07] Dr. Frank Niles: Visualization really has two different components. One is what I call outcome visualization, and the other is process visualizations. Outcome visualization gives us a direction to focus upon. Keeps us motivated and moving in a particular direction. Think about running a marathon. Outcome visualization is envisioning finishing the race in a certain amount of time, the time that you want to finish.
[00:20:34] Process visualization, on the other hand, is when we visualize the different steps we have to go through in order to get to the ultimate outcome. So if we're envisioning ourself wanting to win the race or cross the finish line, as it were, we know that there's gonna be different points throughout the race when we're gonna hit the hall, when the race gets really difficult. So we start envisioning ourselves at mile five, at mile six, at mile 10, at mile 16. And 18, really understanding and feeling in ourselves what we're going to have at that time, so when we experience those feelings, we've already experienced them in our mind and allows us to persevere through. And so what the research shows, that process visualization is incredibly important for us to achieve our ultimate outcome.
[00:21:29] Jaycen: Right, so outcome being more understanding the goal where we want to be. Process we envision, what we feel or think it's going to be. But are we willing to change that visualization when we get new insight? You know, being fluid. Now, that would be a challenge for us. As individuals, as marketers, as business people. Are we willing to pivot and change our positioning based on new information?
[00:21:53] Garret: In my mind, this goes to, like, philosophy of developing that process. That's maybe a little bit of a new skill to learn, of being in a flexible mindset with regard to tactics, or messaging, or strategy. You know, there might be new [inaudible 00:22:08] leverage, there might be new ways of thinking. There might... Allow for fluidity in the journey.
[00:22:13] Hiromi: Yes, which is something's that Tal definitely needed moving forward.
[00:22:18] Dudley Tal Stokes: The cost even grew as the International Federation kept setting different standards for us to meet. We had to travel and race in Europe.
[00:22:27] One of the directors of [inaudible 00:22:29] is PC Harris, who was in- on the bobsled program from the start. He designed a t-shirt, sweatshirt, uh, emblems and so on. And, uh, wrote a song. Put out a record about the bobsled king. [inaudible 00:22:48].
[00:22:49] Finally qualified for the Olympics at the World Cup race in Igls, in Austria, late in December. And that news came out in conjunction with a small article in Time magazine. But that really blew up our profile in Jamaica, and saved the day. Uh, Jamaica Tourist Board stepped in. Bailed us out on the money front, and we were going to the Olympic games.
[00:23:22] We went into a pre-Olympic training camp in Lake Placid, New York, which was one of the toughest tracks in the world. And we started driving the two, practicing, practicing with and high on the Olympics starting one month later. We were prepared for two two-man teams with myself and Michael White, Sammy Clayton, and Devon Harris. But then, one night, there's a knock on my door. And the other driver, Sammy Clayton, was there, and he said to me that he's done. He's leaving. He never said why. I know we were all having a very hard time, very rough track. Sammy left, and that was last I saw of him.
[00:24:08] So we were left there with one driver, and, uh, an Olympic entry, which would be one two-man team. The other athletes came to me and said, you know, "We have all been working hard. I will not have a chance compete in the Olympics, given that we now only have one driver, unless we do the four-man." I called George up, and he said, "Well, I'll see if I can arrange a four-man for you." And he did. So we had one, went to training Lake Placid. Lake Placid doesn't have many starts, so we have to start from halfway up, which is still plenty of speed. And we started on an afternoon, and it as -20, and I must have done 20, 30 runs from the half that afternoon, in -20. We were in tears by the time we finished. But I felt I had a feel for a four-man sled.
[00:25:00] So we turned up in Calgary for the Olympic games, not knowing if we were going to be allowed into the four-man race, because we technically had not qualified a four-man sled. But George worked his magic, and we were accepted in the race. And just one small problem. We did not have a sled. So George went out and worked more magic, and eventually found a sled.
[00:25:23] Speaker 9: Calgary, 1988. The Jamaicans are, to say the least, an oddity. They didn't even have a sled till the four-man event until they got lucky and found an old one someone had forgotten about in the storage room on the mountain.
[00:25:35] Dudley Tal Stokes: Wasn't the best. Found it in the basement. A refrigeration unit. But it was a four-man sled. We were mentally exhausted, but really looking forward to the four-man. Got the sled in reasonable shape, and we started sliding by sitting in on the first day. In the meantime, we spent the afternoon on the push track, practicing the push [inaudible 00:26:00].
[00:26:01] Now, my brother, Chris, who was at the University of Idaho. It was south of Calgary. Of course, I'd come to the athletic games as a spectator. And he came in time to see the two-man race, and then he was around now for four-man training. So he was standing by the push track. We were practicing, and Caswell Allen slips, falls off the sled, sprains his ankle. He can't go.
[00:26:30] Howard Siler, the coach, having been earlier introduced to my brother, turns to George Fitch and said, "My only question is why isn't he on the sled?" George Fitch looked at Howard. He looked at Chris. He looked at me, and he said, "Well, why isn't he on the sled?"
[00:26:46] Speaker 9: Then drove to Calgary to watch his brother.
[00:26:48] Speaker 10: I had no idea in my head at the- at the time that by the end of the week, I'd be in- in an Olympic race.
[00:26:53] Dudley Tal Stokes: It's now about 3 PM on a afternoon, the second week in the Olympic games. Accreditation had closed on December 31st, but by 6 PM, my brother and I were roommates in the Olympic village. He was fully accredited as an athlete, and about to become an Olympian and a bobsled athlete.
[00:27:18] Garret: Don't stand around a bobsled track if you don't want to get in the bobsled, right?
[00:27:23] Hiromi: That is good advice.
[00:27:24] Jaycen: [laughs]
[00:27:26] Hiromi: [laughs]
[00:27:26] Jaycen: Wonder about that process, though, right? Isn't that interesting?
[00:27:30] Garret: We're talking about competing on the most elite level in the world.
[00:27:34] Hiromi: Sure. If five months, am I right? Five months from even knowing what a bobsled is, to competing in the Olympics, it's that drastic, right? That's what, that's the timeline we're talking about. And then, within the last two weeks, completely changing the whole format of the sport, the two-man to a four-man. Like, a completely different sleigh. And then, when- when did his brother hop in there? It was the first day of the four-man race.
[00:28:03] Jaycen: So it was- it was, like, 20th of February. Days. I mean, yeah, right?
[00:28:08] Hiromi: Yeah.
[00:28:09] Jaycen: That's insane. Yeah, like, like, you said, even just experiencing ice. I mean, never experienced ice before. Never experienced Lycra suits at 20 degrees below [inaudible 00:28:19].
[00:28:16] Hiromi: Yeah. [laughs]
[00:28:20] Garret: So again, even Tal was saying they might very well come in last, but where they had come from and where they got to in 1988 is remarkable.
[00:28:30] Hiromi: Yeah.
[00:28:32] Dudley Tal Stokes: Now, certainly, going into this race into the four-man, there was never a question about us winning a medal, and we didn't entertain that thought or fantasy. But we- we did want to [inaudible 00:28:43] ourselves, to put down our best effort, whatever that may be there. Might well be last, but we needed to be satisfied in ourselves that we had done things to the best of our ability, given the circumstances. Notwithstanding the five months, notwithstanding starting in the four-man two weeks before the Olympics. Not withstanding having a crew that really didn't know how to get into the sled.
[00:29:06] I've never known failure in a real way in my life. I've always been a high flier. Generally successful at whatever I did. And I brought this attitude into the Olympic games. And you know, your first experience of failure is- is like a footballer's first experience of a serious injury. It changes you mentally and come back requires a- a particular mental approach. And that's what I had to do after 1988 games.
[00:29:37] The first day of the four-man race was a circus. We had trouble loading into the sled. My push bar failed to stay up on the first push, and it collapsed, and I fell head first into the sled. Somehow, I got myself into a driving position. But it was chaos, and we watched it that night, and at a critique, exchanged some words, and we set out to do better the following day. When we knew we would be early in the order of the hill, the first ice. And so this was the day.
[00:30:11] Well, I woke up that morning with a temperature of 102 degrees, as I caught the bug that goes through pretty much every Olympics games. But it was the practice in those days, people go over to the track before a race. Walking in the track. Look at the curves, look at the track condition. It's more about getting in the right mindset. And while doing that, I slipped and fell, and broke my collarbone. Real sick fracture. So I got to the top, sick, temperature, headache, broken collarbone. British physio fixed me up with some magic spray, which deadened the pain, but I don't know if it did much good for my collarbone.
[00:30:52] Then we got to the start, and we were waiting to go for our turn, and George Fitch said to me, "Your coach is gone." I said, "What?" He said, "Yes, your coach left. He had to go back to work. He flew out this morning." This was Howard Siler, who is a person in whom I'd invested a lot of my own confidence, and had been at the start with me for all the starts I'd been to up to this point. So hearing that he was gone was a bit unnerving.
[00:31:21] Anyway, we pulled it together, got out there, we actually had the- the seventh fastest start of the race that day, largely as a consequence of my brother coming onto the steps.
[00:31:31] Speaker 11: See if they can do it a little better today. Well, just about. 5.32, seventh fastest.
[00:31:40] Dudley Tal Stokes: What we got in slightly better, in terms of getting in the sled, but sitting in the sled was chaotic, and people were all over each other, including over me. And so I found that if you [inaudible 00:31:52] to steer from the start, we're going very quickly, was in a very uncomfortable position, and I just got further and further behind the sled, until we came to a big 270 degree curve [inaudible 00:32:03]. We started doing what's called a porpoise, going up and down, up and down as we missed the steering points in the curve.
[00:32:11] Speaker 11: It's getting one or two rather untidy high points on these bends. Much harder to drive these four-man sleds.
[00:32:18] Dudley Tal Stokes: And eventually, we were going up as the curve ended, and over we went.
[00:32:23] Speaker 11: [inaudible 00:32:24] oh, and he's under- he's over. Oh, dear me. Oh, that's terrible. Oh, that's a bad crash, I'm afraid.
[00:32:30] Dudley Tal Stokes: As we were climbing on the end of that curve, the crash, I knew we were going over, and the thought in my head was, "Oh, no, not in the Olympics, four billion eyeballs." And then I hit my head really hard. Literally saw stars. My life flashed before my eyes.
[00:32:49] Speaker 2: I just remember, you know, looking, "I say, this doesn't feel too right." With a little- little bang with a [inaudible 00:32:55]. I- I don't know that left turn. Until now, I start to- to smell my helmet, which is fiberglass, burning on the ice, which is something that stays with you for- for many years afterwards.
[00:33:04] Dudley Tal Stokes: The drill when you're a bobsled driver in a crash, is to pull yourself under the [inaudible 00:33:10], which is relatively safe. You have something around you all the way. And then leave space for the rest of the crew. But we were so badly packed in the sled, and then once it went over, everybody moved even further down, and I was pressed up against the core, and I could not get my head under, and we went through two curves like that. I hit my head really hard again. And I realize, I wasn't going to be able to get under the core, and so I stopped. I stopped trying. It was useless, so I just relaxed.
[00:33:43] Things became really quiet, at least in my mind. I sat there and watched the ice go by. Flash of white. And then I started thinking to myself, "Well, this is not right. This is not where we should we. This was just a disaster. How did I get here? How we going to make this different?" And I remember a moment in all this, was that I'd figured it out in my mind. The resources, the [inaudible 00:34:16] equipment. I just started visualizing. And working through it, so first 10 seconds of the crash was trying to figure out how to survive and realizing that it wasn't going to happen. And the final 18 seconds was really spent mapping out what would turn out to be the next nine years of my life.
[00:34:42] Afterwards, when we were in the ambulance being checked, I shared the future with my brother, and what I needed him to do. And we got going on that plan, right after the crash. This was my first experience of failure, or a really real setback in life. And I was determined that this moment would not define me. I am going to find out what is necessary to become good at this, and I'm going to become good.
[00:35:14] I had my head down, and all- all I could hear was my spikes crunching through the ice. I mean, every step was, like, amplified in my brain. And then I started to hear this cheering, and I lift up my head a little bit. We walk, saw them ride through the finish and some of them, but the crowd started cheering and waving. So, you know, the guys started cheering [inaudible 00:35:38].
[00:35:39] Hiromi: It's amazing how during that crash, his outcome-based visualization was untouched. But his process was already starting to change. That quote, that the crash lasted 28 seconds. The first 10 seconds were realizing that his current process was falling apart. And the last 18 was just mapping out the new one. And he was going through all those thoughts as his head was being dragged down the ice.
[00:36:12] Garret: And what I think is so interesting is in this moment, he's visualizing the process of getting to the next nine years of his life. The whole trajectory of this endeavor over and above that one minute of driving the bobsled. And so it's interesting to see visualization on a micro and macro level that he's using in different ways.
[00:36:32] Hiromi: Yeah.
[00:36:33] Jaycen: There's something interesting in this book called Range, by journalist David Epstein. Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialist World. In terms of visualization, on basketball, or any athletic endeavor, like chess, like golf. There's known, quantifiable things that you can visualize in terms of getting better in your performance. And according to a psychologist, Robin Hogarth, these are learning environments where we know all the elements. And then they call the areas where we don't know all the elements wicked learning environments.
[00:37:05] I was thinking, like, in the case of Tal. In crashing, in starting to visualize and adjust his process and how he can get to that same outcome. All the training and skills that he had developed up to that point were outside of this discipline, outside of bobsled. But that desire to get to the outcome that he already was starting to imagine. How can we perform at a better level? That helped him to be able to formalize his path forward.
[00:37:33] He looked at this as a major failure, but he didn't want that failure to define him. He already started working on visualizing how to get better at what he was doing.
[00:37:42] Hiromi: Yeah, it's such a shame that for many, this is where Tal's story ends, as someone who crashed at the 1988 Olympics. The truth is, though, that this was only the start of Tal's journey. And in the next episode, Tal describes how he further refined his visualization approach for a rematch at the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer.
[00:38:03] Dudley Tal Stokes: Top bobsled drivers do three, 400 run a year. Well, I made up the gap by getting into a state of deep mental relaxation and visualizing bobsled runs again and again and again to get up to my 400 runs a season. 80% of them were between my ears.
[00:38:22] Hiromi: How did he accomplish this? And are there ways to apply this practice in marketing? All this and more next time on Reach.
Follow the Reach LinkedIn Page to access more content, participate in the conversation, and get updates on releases and events.
