Bryan Neale is an NFL referee, owner of Blind Zebra, business coach, and speaker who helps leaders and teams unlock their full potential. He brings lessons from the field and the boardroom to inspire performance, resilience, and growth.
05:12 Future of Officiating & Technology
15:22 Life Beyond Calls
18:47 Post-Game Mental Toughness Reflection & Cataloging
31:12 Perspective Shift: Managing Roles vs Personal Feelings
36:18 Correcting Mistakes, Immediate Accountability
40:50 From Radio to Global Reach
42:30 Start & Never Stop
45:30 Mental Toughness Principle
47:00 Acceptance in Practice
54:30 Practicing Acceptance Through Challenges
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Dr. Rob Bell
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Dr. Rob Bell: Today's guest on the Mental Toughness Podcast knows how to call it when it counts. He is the founder of Blind Zebra. He's a veteran sales coach, co-host of the Advanced Selling Podcast, one of the longest-running sales podcasts out there.
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Dr. Rob Bell: And he trades the mic and the stage for stripes as an NFL umpire, even working Super Bowl 56. We're talking decision-making under pressure, toughness, hinged moments, zero excuses. Our guest today is Brian Neal, who's in the house. Brian, my man, thanks for taking the time, bud.
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Bryan Neale: Thanks, Dr. Bell. Great to be here, brother.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah, man, any good, spit and rally moments lately?
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Bryan Neale: You know, it's been a fun season so far.
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Bryan Neale: Fun season. We're off to a… we're off to a start, aren't we?
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Dr. Rob Bell: I do love seeing you out there, man. Tell me about the glasses, though.
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Bryan Neale: Those are, the ones I wear on the field are company-issued.
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Dr. Rob Bell: what's the, brand called? The biking brand? They're really pop… Oakley's. Oakley. Oh, yeah. Oakleys. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Bryan Neale: And they, formulated them for officiating, which is pretty cool. So they looked at our compare-contrast colors, which are essentially white, green, and brown, so ball.
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Bryan Neale: Shoes, field, lines.
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Bryan Neale: And formulated them for, outdoor high sun, night and low light evening.
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Bryan Neale: Stuff, and then, indoor, to remove glare from the lights and stuff like that.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Oh.
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Bryan Neale: Oh, that's what I wear them, I love them. Yeah, not prescription, I wear contacts underneath them, but…
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Bryan Neale: I'm a fan. I'm a fan.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Well, I mean, when you wear those, it looks like, wow, that would make everything a little bit clearer, because I think we've all kind of worn those type of…
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Dr. Rob Bell: Of glasses, so it's cool, man.
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Bryan Neale: That's what they are. Yeah, especially the amber ones at night, and, you know, in a mid-low light, they really sharpen up contrast. It's really, really good. Really good. I'm a fan.
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Bryan Neale: Nice, man.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Well, let's get into it, man. I mean, 8 years old, man, like, you know, you kind of saw your future at that time. Pick us up from there, man.
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Bryan Neale: Yeah, we, yeah, I was,
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Bryan Neale: summertime, my dad, you know, came home from, work to take me and my brother to go see the movie Superman, and,
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Bryan Neale: Before we left, he, thought it'd be a good idea to set us both up on the counter and let us know that he and my mom were gonna get divorced at, you know…
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Bryan Neale: that month, and kind of hit it from there, and I'd always bounced around as a kid. I was in different…
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Bryan Neale: I think 5 different elementary schools, first 6 years, first 6 grades. Kind of a new kid, quiet. Not a real stereotype here, not like a…
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Bryan Neale: aggressive boy. Like, you'd think of a boy as a young man, like, aggressive, you know, I wasn't that kid.
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Bryan Neale: And so I moved home to my… we were up in Indianapolis at the time, and moved to my hometown, back home where my mom and dad grew up to Evansville, and my grandpa signed me up for Little League Football. And, it became my outlet, dude. It was like…
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Bryan Neale: I put those pads on, and you get to knock the crap out of another kid.
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Bryan Neale: and get praise for it. And so I had double things going. I had this physical and emotional outlet.
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Bryan Neale: for my parents splitting up, and I was getting… I didn't see my dad much. He was, you know, it was every other weekend sort of deal, and
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Bryan Neale: my football coaches became father figures to me. They're the guys that would, you know, bust my tail when I needed it busted, and praise me when I needed praise, and I just got… all that together got me just in, like, so deeply emotionally connected to football.
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Bryan Neale: Only problem was,
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Bryan Neale: you could use a sundial to time my 40-yard dash. I was… concrete shoes, man, I was so slow.
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Bryan Neale: I have 3 sons now, they play pretty good high school football here in Indianapolis, at Cathedral High School, all linemen, and I found out the slowness is genetic. It's, like, just in the genes, man. I mean, I watch my boys run, I'm like, you trying to run that slow? Like, you're going backwards, dude.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Right.
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Bryan Neale: So, went to the coaches, and I'm like, hey, I want to stay involved in football. I think I want to volunteer to be an assistant football coach.
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Bryan Neale: I'm not… How old are you at this point? Oh, this… yeah, so flash forward, I would go all… I'd play, play football, you know, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th grade, all the way up, and I was just, like, it was my thing. I loved it, loved it. It was really… we were really successful up until my senior year.
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Bryan Neale: I was always a captain of a team, leadership role, super serious about it, and then that senior year comes and it's over, couldn't play college football too slow.
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Bryan Neale: gonna be… I thought about being a volunteer coach, and they're like, you don't want to do that, because you're not gonna… I wasn't going into education. I was gonna be a business guy. And they're like, you need to get your officiating license, like, you know. Which I didn't realize at the time.
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Bryan Neale: They were like, you kind of have the demeanor for that, which was what they were saying, was you're kind of a dork. That's what they were saying, like, underneath the, you know, under the… in the tea leaves. I'm like, yeah, you're kind of built that way.
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Bryan Neale: No one really grows up like, man, you know what I'm gonna do when I'm big? I'm gonna be a referee. Like, it's kind of a dorky thing to say.
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Bryan Neale: But I was like, you know what, I'mma do it.
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Bryan Neale: So I, yeah, sent off for, to sign up for the rules test.
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Bryan Neale: Like, this is funny. My first rules test to get my license, I got an 83 out of 100. B-, you know, 83 out of 100. And then what I don't tell people too often is that the rules test is a 100-question, true-false, open-book test.
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Bryan Neale: I get 2 hours to take it, and I still miss 17. Like, if you want to know what the problem is, there's part of the problem.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Nice.
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Bryan Neale: Then that was it. Worked the first game, Bloomington South High School in 1988, and was hooked, man. Absolutely hooked.
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Dr. Rob Bell: You make that transition, then, to Big Ten.
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Bryan Neale: Yeah.
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Dr. Rob Bell: So from there, like, obviously then you have, like, a vision of where you want to go. When was the NFL, like, hey, that's the next level of where I want to be?
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Bryan Neale: Yeah, this came back, you know, so much goes back to my coaches. We were required at my high school, every summer, every football player in the program had to write a goal note card down. We had… we were… and we had to present them to our coaches.
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Bryan Neale: And they had to be time-bound, they had to be specific, and those sorts of things. And so I learned to do that as a general practice. I didn't know any better, I just was… have to… but I'm like, I like this, I'm very clear. So after my first season reffing, in 1988, I sat down
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Bryan Neale: And, with a note card, I did what they taught me to do, and I wrote down age-based things. I said, I want to referee the state championship by age 31, and then I just started to add in increments of 5 years, and then I said, I want to be in the Big Ten at 36.
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Bryan Neale: Nfl at 41, and Super Bowl at 51, age-wise. That's what I was after there. And I didn't know how all that stuff worked. I didn't know how to get into college, I didn't know how to get in the Big Ten, I didn't know how to get in the NFL, I just knew what I wanted.
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Bryan Neale: At that point, and that came from those coaches, too. It was a really, really good gift that they gave me.
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Dr. Rob Bell: So that's one of those… I mean, that's the life lesson. We always talk about life lessons in sports, right? Like, that was a life lesson, man, that carried over and had a huge impact.
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Bryan Neale: Yeah, 100%. And you don't realize it's a lesson until, you know, after the fact. I was just doing what I was told to do, and
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Bryan Neale: You know, I didn't know any better.
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Bryan Neale: And, you know, I'm a fan of… I love committing things in writing.
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Bryan Neale: I'm not overly woo, where, like, oh, everything you write down comes true. Like, people do vision boards, that's great, I think that's really awesome. I do think there's something about putting something in physical form that allows it… gives it more strength, more energy than just, like.
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Bryan Neale: Thinking about it vaguely.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Right.
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Bryan Neale: You know, I'm just a fan of it. It just works for me. And then I'm like, it doesn't do any harm, so why not? Might as well write it down, you know?
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Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah. I'm, I'm big in that too, man. I think when you write it down, you can look at it, you help manifest it, you know?
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Bryan Neale: I agree. I agree. And it's just more fun to think it's all connected.
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Bryan Neale: Yeah, flash forward, I got, you know, I started reffing,
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Bryan Neale: high school ball, and, got, graduated from college, got a job, and then I'm, interested in college, and I go
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Bryan Neale: ref a, some JVD3 in Columbus, Ohio.
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Bryan Neale: Most people don't even know Division III schools, a lot of them will have JV games on Monday nights. You know why? It's so the parents don't get pissed that their kids are, you know, spending $90 a year and their kid's not playing.
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Bryan Neale: So I have a freshman out there, so…
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Bryan Neale: And then, you know, you just start to find a way on how the path works. And then you get lots of help, and keep the goals, and all that jazz, so…
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Dr. Rob Bell: You know, one of the things I was hoping you could talk about, man, is,
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Dr. Rob Bell: you know, the Auburn-Oregon 2011 championship game.
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Bryan Neale: Yeah.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Obviously, I mean, I remember that game as a fantastic game.
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Dr. Rob Bell: And, but there was a tough moment in that game, man. I was hoping maybe you could unpack that, and like, hey, the lesson that came from that one.
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Bryan Neale: I'd love to. I'd love to. There's a tough moment before that that no one ever… I don't know if I've ever talked about this publicly. Some people know that know me.
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Bryan Neale: So I got assigned the dream… now, I did not have the national championship written on my card, on my vision card. That wasn't part of the deal. It just sort of all lined up that way, but I got the call to referee the BCS National Championship game. First time the game was broadcast on ESPN.
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Bryan Neale: It had usually just been an ABC, you know, CBS sort of thing, they've threw it back and forth.
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Bryan Neale: 26 million people watching this game, and it was Auburn versus Oregon. It was, Cam Newton's last game as a college player.
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Bryan Neale: Big, big stage.
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Bryan Neale: you know, we're gonna be out there in front of a lot of people, so I, I love… I don't anymore, because my knee… I'm trying to keep my knees, but I ran.
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Bryan Neale: Stay in shape, stay emotionally, physically, you know, fit.
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Bryan Neale: Not… not to the level you do, Dr. Bell.
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Bryan Neale: But just jog, you know, whatever. Yeah. And I'm, the week before the game, two days before the game, before I left, two days before I left for Arizona, I'm jogging, down here in Indianapolis. It's cold, it's January, but I was pretty decent at stretching. And all of a sudden, I got a grab, bink, in my hamstring.
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Bryan Neale: And you know, if you've ever pulled a hamstring, it grabs you, and you know. Like, there's no, there's no, like, oh, that's weird, it's like.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah, no.
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Bryan Neale: No. It's different than it gets a little tight. It grabs, and I'm like, oh my god, that did not just happen to me. And I went to a treatment person, and she's like.
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Bryan Neale: You got a grade 1, not horrible.
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Bryan Neale: But I'm like, well, I'm not staying out of this game.
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Bryan Neale: So, we, did a little rehab, you know, a couple days as best we could, worked it out, did all the stuff you're supposed to do, and, tried to work it out, you know, doing a hike, out there, too, and, essentially, I peg-legged that game. I worked that game with a grade 1 torn, torn hamstring. Not crazy bad, but, you know.
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Bryan Neale: Yeah, that was a hinge moment.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Now, do you have to tell, like, your team, like, before you're heading out there at all?
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Bryan Neale: They knew, they knew, yeah, I had a… had it, you know, wrapped up, sleeved, and all that stuff. Hamster, you can't really do much with, you sort of have to just, like, modify. But I thought, you know what, it's my one shot, I gotta do this. It's a hinge moment. Like, you know, I could have tapped out. I… and this is good to know, I think about this for, you know, pro athletes especially.
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Bryan Neale: You know, as a high-performance-minded person, There's this balance of…
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Bryan Neale: I know myself, and I'm self-aware, and is whatever I have gonna bring my team down?
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Dr. Rob Bell: And I had that decision to make for sure.
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Bryan Neale: And I felt very comfortable that I could move to the level that I needed to move that wouldn't harm the team or my performance. Had that been different, had it been a grade 3 or something, I definitely would have tapped out from a, team perspective, if that makes sense, like…
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Dr. Rob Bell: Right. Yeah. And what was your role for that game?
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Bryan Neale: I was the umpire. So we're in this game, and the umpire stands, it's a little different than it used to be. It's still the same in college. College, there's 8 officials on a football field. In the NFL, there's only 7.
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Bryan Neale: And there's a person that stands behind the linebackers, so most people listening to this probably know football, but if you don't, you know, it's the defense. Two guys, like, standing there, staring at the quarterback, essentially, about 5 to 7 yards, on the defensive side of the ball. And,
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Bryan Neale: You know, there's a lot of traffic, there's a lot of pass patterns that go on and out of there. A lot of teams intentionally would use the umpire to, you know, pick someone off.
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Bryan Neale: So the game's going on, it's a really great atmosphere, great game, tight game.
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Bryan Neale: And oregon is down, I think, 4, with about 5-ish minutes to go in the fourth quarter driving, and they've got a 4th and 5.
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Bryan Neale: And… I'm at… I'm standing there, getting ready for this play, and all I'm thinking is, they need to get to where I'm standing, so I need to get forward. I need to move forward as soon as the ball snapped, and get out of the way.
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Bryan Neale: Tell them, thinking in my mind, get off of this. I had to start at this 5-yard line, so that's where they need to get to. I'm like, this is the hotline, I gotta get off this line, move forward.
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Bryan Neale: And I was so tunnel-visioned.
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Bryan Neale: on that idea that I wasn't aware of what was going on around me. So the ball snapped, and I start to move forward, and as I did, one of the inside receivers for Oregon starts running right to where I'm moving up to.
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Bryan Neale: And he is in… he's being covered by a defender for Auburn, who's in man coverage, who's right behind him, looking back at the quarterback.
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Bryan Neale: And I run right into the defender. And as a reaction, when you get hit, you know, you protect yourself, I sort of shimmied my arm up a little bit and knocked the defender on the ground.
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Bryan Neale: Receiver was wide open, gained about 15 yards, and Oregon went and scored a touchdown to go up
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Bryan Neale: With just a couple minutes left in the game.
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Bryan Neale: And in that moment.
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Bryan Neale: It's literally the worst thing I could do at my position, on the biggest stage in front of 26 million people, knowing that I'd already applied to the National Football League.
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Bryan Neale: Knowing that they're scouting and watching us. Oh. In that moment, there's that thing in your head, I'm like, that's it.
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Bryan Neale: I just blew it. My whole… everything's done, like, you know what I mean? I mean, the game's still going, but I'm like, that's it. Like, you know, NFL's gonna look at this like, you know…
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Bryan Neale: But the game was still going on. I still had to ref the rest of the championship, national championship game, and it's down… we were under a 3-point, you know, 3-point,
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Bryan Neale: It's a 3-point game. And Auburn's got the ball, and they got Cam Newton, so I gotta keep rolling. So I quick, snapped out of that. I'm like, okay, I just gotta, you know, stay here, stay focused. And then, Auburn got the ball back, and there's another play.
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Bryan Neale: That people forget about sometime. Where an Auburn running back, went down and rolled over a defender and wasn't down, and it was right in front of me.
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Bryan Neale: And I'm looking at it going, he's not down in my head, you know, he's not… I didn't blow my whistle, thank God, I didn't call him down or say, he's down, he's down, because he wasn't, and he just takes off running.
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Bryan Neale: And he ran, I don't know how many yards, a long way.
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Bryan Neale: Because everyone thought he was down, he wasn't. It was a fantastic decision by a couple of us on the field.
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Bryan Neale: And Auburn ended up kicking a field goal to win the game.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah.
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Bryan Neale: Walk off field goal. And so, like, you talk about hinge moments? I'm like, there's two huge hinge moments on the opposite side of the hinge, if that makes sense. It's like…
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Bryan Neale: These tiny little moments in your life make these enormous differences, and I know when NFL scouts, anybody, players do this all the time.
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Bryan Neale: They, they, for officiating, they look for things like the, I got in the way on the fourth down play. They want to see what I do after that. They don't care that that happened.
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Bryan Neale: They care… they do, and they care way more to see what I did after that.
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Bryan Neale: And to see, can you get your stuff together? Because it's a really tight game still, and make a call and a decision, like, luckily we made on the,
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Bryan Neale: On the running back being down.
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Dr. Rob Bell: So, in that moment when that happens, man, to snap yourself out of it, to refocus, like, you're saying that mantra to yourself, like, what did you do to go through those steps in order to…
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Dr. Rob Bell: You know, just get centered.
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Bryan Neale: Yeah, you know, you hear this, you hear this about,
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Bryan Neale: pro athletes and high-performance people, this, idea of, like, having a good short-term memory or a bad short-term memory that can let things go. And in the NFL, there's plays, you know, they have the phrasing, play the next play, it's the next play, because it's just over.
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Bryan Neale: very difficult to do, and the way I looked at it then, I looked at it more as, duty than anything else.
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Bryan Neale: Like, I owe it to this guy. I care so much because of my deep emotional connection to football, I care about the game.
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Bryan Neale: beyond what most people do, I think. You know, it's not just… it's so much more than a game to me.
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Bryan Neale: And I care about it so much that that was the motive.
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Bryan Neale: to get re-centered. I heard another phrase, we used, we heard a person that came and worked with our fish eating department, that… this is the phrase I use now, I didn't have this in the Auburn-Oregon game, and the phrase is, right here, right now. That's my re-centering phrase, right here, right now. You've heard that, or know who said that.
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Bryan Neale: Right here, right now, that's my thing. So now, if I catch myself.
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Bryan Neale: you know, replaying a play from, you know, to a series ago or something, or anything. You know how your brain goes sometimes. You're out there on the field, sometimes it pops in your head that, you know.
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Bryan Neale: oh my god, I've got to clean out that closet downstairs that my wife told me about, like, and it's the middle of an NFL game, like, right here, right now. Right here, right now. I gotta come back to center. That's been really helpful for me.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah. No, I love that, man, I appreciate you sharing it. So, it was the… but then you responded, make a fantastic play, didn't, you know, allowed the play to play out.
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Bryan Neale: Yeah.
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Dr. Rob Bell: And then, did that end up being then the moment that they looked at and said, hey, you know, we saw how you responded, and…
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Bryan Neale: I don't think so. I don't think it's that binary or myopic. I think they're more, body of work. But that's a trait, I think, that you'll see. Like, you know, you see it in pro, you know, they,
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Bryan Neale: You see it, there's a look, I always say, if I go to, like, a college basketball game.
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Bryan Neale: There's a look at the team that… if they're down 20, there's just a look that comes over the team, and the coach sometimes, and you're like, they're done.
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Dr. Rob Bell: Right. And sometimes maybe they should be done, you know? It's like, okay.
00:18:15 --> 00:18:20
Bryan Neale: But the other times, you know, I refereed the Michigan-Appalachian State game, I think in 2007.
00:18:20 --> 00:18:25
Dr. Rob Bell: Where Appalachian State beat Michigan, one of the, probably, arguably the biggest upset in the.
00:18:25 --> 00:18:27
Bryan Neale: Big-time college football history.
00:18:27 --> 00:18:33
Bryan Neale: And so I've seen that. I've seen a team that's not scared of the Goliath, and…
00:18:33 --> 00:18:37
Bryan Neale: And just stayed with it the whole game, and put themselves in a position to win the game, and did.
00:18:38 --> 00:18:41
Bryan Neale: And so I always think about that, that,
00:18:41 --> 00:18:48
Bryan Neale: You know, the thing's not over till it's over, and, you know, the players and the players are gonna decide when it's over and how it's over.
00:18:50 --> 00:18:53
Bryan Neale: Like, it's more of a body-of-work thing, how you do anything.
00:18:53 --> 00:18:54
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah.
00:18:54 --> 00:19:00
Dr. Rob Bell: When, like, talk to us about, like, so what are some of these mental reps and prep that you do?
00:19:00 --> 00:19:04
Dr. Rob Bell: Referee and umpire-wise, and then especially, like, as a team, as a unit.
00:19:04 --> 00:19:05
Bryan Neale: Yeah.
00:19:05 --> 00:19:15
Bryan Neale: I love talking about this. Coming up through the ranks when I had, you know, I had these goals written down, and it took a minute, you know, it took me 27 years from my first
00:19:15 --> 00:19:24
Bryan Neale: JV game I reffed in 1988, until I got in the NFL on, March 22nd, 2014, 1148 AM. Not that I remember that, but…
00:19:24 --> 00:19:40
Bryan Neale: It's a good call to get. And again, things I learned from my, my football coaches. We listened to this old speech from an old Illinois coach in the 30s, and it's, he, we called it the proper state of mind. It's a poem.
00:19:40 --> 00:19:47
Bryan Neale: But this guy gave this big speech, and then ended it with the poem, The Proper State of Mind, which is a really great poem for your listeners to go check out.
00:19:49 --> 00:20:03
Bryan Neale: So I was… we were kind of trained to visualize those sorts of things, so I would go out as I was in D3 and worked in the Mid-American Conference, and I would jog over to Butler University, which is about 2 miles from where I lived.
00:20:03 --> 00:20:04
Dr. Rob Bell: Okay.
00:20:04 --> 00:20:14
Bryan Neale: at 6 in the morning, and I would work, you know, a 35, 45, 50-minute mock game with no players and no football, just me.
00:20:14 --> 00:20:29
Bryan Neale: I'd go to the 35-yard line, get ready down for the kickoff, I'd visualize the kickoff going, I'd run into the hash, I'd pretend I got my keys, I'd pretend to catch a ball from a ball boy, I'd go pretend to set it down, I'd signal first down, first down, boom, all the things.
00:20:29 --> 00:20:31
Dr. Rob Bell: And.
00:20:31 --> 00:20:34
Bryan Neale: Over and over and over to practice process.
00:20:34 --> 00:20:39
Bryan Neale: And that's a thing that I think a lot of people miss sometimes. They practice,
00:20:39 --> 00:20:49
Bryan Neale: I know you're big in the… on the golf in the world, and I'm not big in the golf world, but it seems, my friends that are, they're really good at that, there's so much routine and process that good golfers
00:20:49 --> 00:21:02
Bryan Neale: do, because you see… and you almost see it when you watch PGA. Certain golfers, you almost know their routine, their putting routine, you know, and they do it the same every time. And it's that process more than it is the shot.
00:21:03 --> 00:21:07
Bryan Neale: That's the thing that makes them really, really good. That's my feeling.
00:21:07 --> 00:21:19
Bryan Neale: And, so we do that, you know, I'm constantly doing that. We do lots of work on film, obviously, you can watch ourselves. The other thing we do, and I learned this, one of the most iconic
00:21:19 --> 00:21:28
Bryan Neale: referees ever again. Jerry Markbright, you know, if you put, like, a Mount Rushmore of referees, Jerry would be on the Mount Rushmore. Okay. And just a great human being.
00:21:29 --> 00:21:42
Bryan Neale: great teacher, great, great coach, great supporter of football and referee, and jerry used to talk about, everyone plans and visualizes success. He said, you should also visualize for catastrophe.
00:21:42 --> 00:21:48
Bryan Neale: And picture yourself in catastrophe and how you handle really bad things, to practice that.
00:21:48 --> 00:21:51
Bryan Neale: Because anyone can call an easy false start.
00:21:51 --> 00:22:01
Bryan Neale: You know? But what happens when, you know, there's a false start, and then another guy hits another guy, and then next thing you know, and the coach runs out on the field? What do you do then? You know? Plan for the catastrophe.
00:22:01 --> 00:22:13
Bryan Neale: Yeah. And I thought, that's because people, like, well, it's, you know, positive in the latitude and positive thinking, like, let's practice when things go bad. If you're coaching a golfer, let's, you know, practice when he sprays one into the lake.
00:22:13 --> 00:22:16
Bryan Neale: You know? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's an interesting thing.
00:22:16 --> 00:22:23
Dr. Rob Bell: Because you have emotion, then, that's… that's gonna try and lead, and you can't be leading by emotion, right?
00:22:23 --> 00:22:24
Bryan Neale: Amen.
00:22:24 --> 00:22:25
Dr. Rob Bell: Important part, man.
00:22:25 --> 00:22:27
Bryan Neale: Amen. Gotta stay calm and just, like.
00:22:27 --> 00:22:30
Bryan Neale: I try really hard to make my pulse
00:22:31 --> 00:22:49
Bryan Neale: and have my pulse… have an inverted relationship to the pressure of the game or the time of the game. So, if you put a heart monitor on me, I'd want my pulse to drop in the fourth quarter two-minute drill, take away the running, because I run, but just that whatever… I'm just, like, really quiet and centered.
00:22:49 --> 00:22:52
Bryan Neale: In that 2-minute drill, to see everything and really focus.
00:22:53 --> 00:23:01
Bryan Neale: Like, as much as humanly possible, because you're tired, it's emotional, you know, all those things, and you really need to pull that forward.
00:23:01 --> 00:23:01
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah.
00:23:02 --> 00:23:09
Dr. Rob Bell: When… talk to us, you shared with me one time, and I always remember this, but, like, you know, as an umpire, as a referee, like, fishing outside of your pond.
00:23:10 --> 00:23:22
Bryan Neale: Yeah. I was hoping you'd kind of delve into that one, man. Yeah, for sure. You know, football's a… you know, there's debates about this, but I'm a football's the ultimate team sport thing, because when you start to think about, you've got…
00:23:22 --> 00:23:30
Bryan Neale: Linemen who have a physical ability, you've got receivers, you have quarterbacks, you have long snappers, holders, kickers.
00:23:30 --> 00:23:43
Bryan Neale: always such different… there's not many sports that… where there's that many different types of people coming together for one thing. Fishiating is no different. We have spots on the field, and the field is so big, and there's so many things going on, that we watch different areas.
00:23:44 --> 00:23:49
Bryan Neale: Everything is process-oriented, so everything is mechanical in terms of where we stand and where we look.
00:23:50 --> 00:24:03
Bryan Neale: Then there's the broad part of this, and I think about this, I think about my… the three levels that I work with. I think about my vision first, so am I looking where I'm supposed to be looking? That's kind of like the basic, fundamental stuff.
00:24:03 --> 00:24:09
Bryan Neale: Then I move outside of that to my perspective. And now I'm thinking, okay, you know, there's…
00:24:09 --> 00:24:12
Bryan Neale: in the Oregon-Auburn example.
00:24:13 --> 00:24:23
Bryan Neale: I only had vision. I was only focused on getting from the 5-yard line, you know, past the line of scrimmage, forward. That's all I was thinking. I didn't have perspective.
00:24:23 --> 00:24:33
Bryan Neale: Which is, I didn't look at the formation and go, oh, there's 3 receivers over there. And that inside guy just might run a route right towards me. I better take a peek or have a sense of him being there.
00:24:33 --> 00:24:38
Bryan Neale: That's the perspective, and then I have my intuition. Then I feel things coming at me.
00:24:39 --> 00:24:42
Bryan Neale: And, I try to use those things on the field.
00:24:43 --> 00:24:49
Bryan Neale: And so, when you talk about fishing outside of your pond, I have a definite, you know, this is where I look, and this is my job.
00:24:49 --> 00:24:58
Bryan Neale: Then I have my perspective and my intuition that I can leverage and trust sometimes to see an action that may be outside of that.
00:24:58 --> 00:25:06
Bryan Neale: that's a foul that, for whatever reason, another person on my crew missed, or couldn't see, or whatever, where I can come save the crew on something.
00:25:06 --> 00:25:09
Bryan Neale: Totally outside of my thing, you know?
00:25:10 --> 00:25:13
Bryan Neale: And I think that's a skill you can develop over time.
00:25:14 --> 00:25:22
Bryan Neale: We talk about your overtime in football, your… the game slows, and your vision can expand. You can see more things.
00:25:22 --> 00:25:25
Bryan Neale: It takes a while to get there, though.
00:25:26 --> 00:25:27
Bryan Neale: And it's hard to do.
00:25:27 --> 00:25:30
Dr. Rob Bell: Intuition, it's the gift of experience.
00:25:30 --> 00:25:32
Bryan Neale: I like that, yes.
00:25:32 --> 00:25:37
Bryan Neale: Yeah, it's hard… it's hard to have without experience, isn't it? Correct. For sure.
00:25:37 --> 00:25:47
Bryan Neale: Yes. You'll say that. You'll… you know, we call, roughing the passer. And, my position, umpire, just started calling roughing the passer about 3 years ago.
00:25:47 --> 00:25:58
Bryan Neale: And so this has been something I've been working on. So I watch a lot of film, I talk to my peers who are quarter… or who are head referees who've been calling it, give me some tips, I've got some framework and process.
00:25:58 --> 00:26:04
Bryan Neale: high, low, late punishing. Those are, like, the four things in my head. Was it high? Was it low? Was it late? Was it punishing? So now I've got all this stuff.
00:26:05 --> 00:26:19
Bryan Neale: Then that happens so fast, I'm now to the point where I'm starting to trust my intuition now. Because I've seen enough that I've called right, and I've seen enough that I've missed and should have called and didn't. I've got the… the vision part is there.
00:26:19 --> 00:26:23
Bryan Neale: Now I've got enough of those where I can rely on intuition.
00:26:23 --> 00:26:34
Bryan Neale: And you watch this action, and you go… you don't even… it's not like, oh, his, you know, left corner of his thing hit it, like, no, it's just like, as a foul. It's roughing the passer.
00:26:35 --> 00:26:37
Bryan Neale: And be right more than you're wrong.
00:26:37 --> 00:26:37
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah.
00:26:37 --> 00:26:38
Bryan Neale: I love it.
00:26:39 --> 00:26:40
Dr. Rob Bell: when,
00:26:42 --> 00:26:47
Dr. Rob Bell: The part that was fascinating me… I mean, it's okay to get specific with this, man? So, like…
00:26:48 --> 00:26:51
Dr. Rob Bell: the brotherly shove, right? I mean, the tush push.
00:26:51 --> 00:26:52
Bryan Neale: Yeah.
00:26:52 --> 00:26:58
Dr. Rob Bell: So… It seems to be, like, a tough… Play to officiate.
00:26:59 --> 00:27:07
Dr. Rob Bell: Is that… is that accurate on my part? Because, for one, like, I don't like changing the rules just because somebody's, like, really, really good at it and everybody else isn't good at it, like…
00:27:07 --> 00:27:08
Bryan Neale: Yeah.
00:27:08 --> 00:27:13
Dr. Rob Bell: you know, I'm not about that, but it just seems like that is a tough… Play to officiate.
00:27:13 --> 00:27:29
Bryan Neale: Yeah, so… part of my answer, you're gonna feel like, okay, come on, dude. Every play is tough to officiate. Let's start there. This game is really hard to referee. It's really hard. These guys are really good. You see it every Sunday. Yeah. And they're really good at playing the edge.
00:27:29 --> 00:27:35
Bryan Neale: They know, you know, hold, hold, Licko. It's almost hold liquor. They're so good at theft.
00:27:35 --> 00:27:39
Bryan Neale: It's every play is really hard. So then you go, okay, every play's really hard.
00:27:40 --> 00:27:51
Bryan Neale: there are elements of plays that are harder based on situations. So the fact that we have a compressed line on that play makes it harder to see things than when they're spread out.
00:27:51 --> 00:27:52
Bryan Neale: compact.
00:27:53 --> 00:28:10
Bryan Neale: Past that, there really isn't much to… I mean, it's a rugby scrum. I mean, you just, you know, everyone goes forward, you run in and try to find the football, and that's all you do. It's actually… that part of it is not difficult at all. It's that initial lineup and the timing of people that gets more difficult than…
00:28:10 --> 00:28:26
Bryan Neale: Than others. Another… we don't have to do it as much anymore, but, like, on-side kicks, for me, were so hard because they timed themselves… were they offsides or were they not, as they run toward the ball. And their timing is so precise, ineligible's downfield.
00:28:27 --> 00:28:30
Bryan Neale: These guys are so fast, and their timing is so good.
00:28:30 --> 00:28:46
Bryan Neale: part of your brain goes, the guy's, you know, pass is thrown, the lineman's, like, 7 yards downfield. Like, he had to be downfield. You go back in the film, he wasn't. He was full speed, exactly at the mark, at the precise time the ball was released, and he's so fast, it's deceiving.
00:28:47 --> 00:28:52
Bryan Neale: So there's that kind of precision on all those plays. That play just has its own, like, you know.
00:28:52 --> 00:28:54
Bryan Neale: Groupings of those things that make it tough.
00:28:55 --> 00:28:59
Dr. Rob Bell: How do you see the game changing? Because now, I mean, you have virtual measurement.
00:28:59 --> 00:29:00
Bryan Neale: Yeah, right.
00:29:00 --> 00:29:02
Dr. Rob Bell: What advances do you see coming?
00:29:02 --> 00:29:06
Bryan Neale: Yeah, we've had a couple this year that are, you know, very open about,
00:29:06 --> 00:29:09
Bryan Neale: So, you've got the, replay assist.
00:29:10 --> 00:29:21
Bryan Neale: working now, which I think is great, because, I'll tell you this, and you know me well enough to know this, that no one is harder on us than us.
00:29:21 --> 00:29:26
Bryan Neale: I promise you. And that's… I'm speaking collectively for just about every official I've ever met.
00:29:26 --> 00:29:40
Bryan Neale: No one is harder on us than us. We are highly critical of ourselves, and that's not always a good thing in life, but that's just how the culture is. We're not going to the locker room after the game, high-fiving, like, dude, we nailed that thing. Did you see my call? We're not doing that.
00:29:40 --> 00:29:46
Bryan Neale: We're like, crap, I think I missed this. I think, did you see this? You know, it's that. So we're always dwelling on the things that we screwed up.
00:29:47 --> 00:29:51
Bryan Neale: So that's cultural for us. Doesn't make anybody feel better, but that's how it is.
00:29:51 --> 00:30:05
Bryan Neale: So, when we, you know, throw a face mask foul for a guy that had him on the collar, because you're like, man, he had face… whoa, his neck went around, and you throw it, and then you go back and look at the film, and he didn't, we should fix that. Immediately. Immediately, we should fix that, because it's wrong.
00:30:06 --> 00:30:09
Bryan Neale: And there's reasons why we got it wrong, so you're gonna see that.
00:30:10 --> 00:30:16
Bryan Neale: You know, things like that, where we can use video and a replay assist to expedite something quickly.
00:30:16 --> 00:30:29
Bryan Neale: And then, yeah, the technology with the ball, you know, everyone wants to put a chip in the ball and, like, have it measured. There's a… it's way more complicated than people realize, because you have to have player, knee down, anything but a hand or a foot.
00:30:29 --> 00:30:36
Bryan Neale: And so, somehow, you've got to have technology that measures that relative to where the ball is when that happens. And I'm not any sort of…
00:30:36 --> 00:30:43
Bryan Neale: computer guy to figure that out. I'm sure someone… it's not impossible, but I think that that's coming. There's another element, though, that I always wonder about.
00:30:44 --> 00:30:56
Bryan Neale: I was thinking about… it's funny you brought this up, because I was just thinking about… I'm a big Indy 500, I'm a big Indy car guy, but the 500 for sure. The first race was in, like, 78. I've been going on and off ever since.
00:30:57 --> 00:31:01
Bryan Neale: There's technology now that could make driverless electric cars.
00:31:02 --> 00:31:19
Bryan Neale: And so we could line 33 cars up with no drivers, and no remote controls. They just… they're programmed to… and watch them race. I think that would be really boring. I don't think people would enjoy that. I think people love the human side of all these things. And if we start refereeing games with computers.
00:31:19 --> 00:31:25
Bryan Neale: only, or video only, I think it removes an element of the passion and the emotion of the human
00:31:25 --> 00:31:29
Bryan Neale: You know, the, the, the,
00:31:29 --> 00:31:31
Bryan Neale: The lack of perfection in humans.
00:31:32 --> 00:31:35
Bryan Neale: That's just my take on that, in general.
00:31:35 --> 00:31:36
Bryan Neale: In general.
00:31:37 --> 00:31:52
Dr. Rob Bell: Question for you, because I'm always curious about this one. What are the calls that are non-reviewable? Because it always seems to happen, you know, just as a fan, right? It always seems to happen where if it's like, what do you mean that's not reviewable? Like, I had no idea that wasn't. Like, what are the major ones, man?
00:31:52 --> 00:31:57
Bryan Neale: Think of things… well, think of things… go the other direction with it. Think of things that are more binary.
00:31:57 --> 00:32:03
Bryan Neale: are more… so if it's more binary, it's more reviewable. So did a player step on the line, yes or no?
00:32:03 --> 00:32:10
Bryan Neale: binary. If you have video evidence, you can see it and zoom in on it, right? Did the ball, you know, hit the ground?
00:32:11 --> 00:32:13
Bryan Neale: Yes or no? Did it touch the ground?
00:32:13 --> 00:32:17
Dr. Rob Bell: Did the player step out of bounds? Those sort of things.
00:32:17 --> 00:32:36
Bryan Neale: the binary things are more reviewable. If we have clear… like, if I call roughing the passer, and I say, oh, he hit the, you know, 95 hit the quarterback in the head, and you immediately show the replay, and he missed his head by 8 inches. It's no doubt in anyone's mind. It's clear, there's no debate.
00:32:36 --> 00:32:44
Bryan Neale: Most things that fall into that category are. Things that are less, you've seen this, we tried pass interference, didn't go well.
00:32:45 --> 00:32:49
Bryan Neale: When you trade one person's judgment for another person's judgment.
00:32:49 --> 00:32:56
Bryan Neale: That's not a good trade-off, always. Even with a little technology to help, you're still in the human judgment-to-human judgment.
00:32:57 --> 00:33:03
Bryan Neale: And that's the part where, if I show someone… I jokingly say if it passes the 50 guys in a bar test.
00:33:03 --> 00:33:05
Bryan Neale: You know, if I show up… if I show up…
00:33:05 --> 00:33:06
Dr. Rob Bell: Wait, say that again, Brian.
00:33:06 --> 00:33:18
Bryan Neale: Does it pass the 50 guys in a bar test? Could 50 guys sitting in the bar, when they show the replay, go, oh yeah, he stepped on the line right there? And all 50 guys who've been drinking beer, they go, yeah, he stepped on the line right there? That should be reviewable.
00:33:19 --> 00:33:32
Bryan Neale: You know? But if you show a pass interference, and, you know, you got, you know, half one team's fans, half the other, and you show it, they're like, no it's not, yeah, it is, no it's not, we don't need to review that. That's part of the art. We gotta leave that in the game.
00:33:33 --> 00:33:44
Bryan Neale: Because you'll never… it's a never-ending… and it's a… it's a… at its core, it's an entertainment business. Don't kid anybody, it's an entertainment business, it's an eyeball business, we want passion, people watch, tune in.
00:33:44 --> 00:33:47
Bryan Neale: And, give them a good show, so…
00:33:47 --> 00:33:55
Dr. Rob Bell: No, love it, man. And so, the evaluation process when it comes to you, are you guys evaluated as a unit, and then individually? How does that part work?
00:33:55 --> 00:33:59
Bryan Neale: Mostly individually? Yeah, so game… yeah, yeah, we get,
00:34:00 --> 00:34:20
Bryan Neale: It's a pretty intense grading process, you know, lasts about kind of a 2- or 3-day kind of window, watching film, you know, given, and then all those, grades are then, added up towards the end of the year. We get put into tiers of performance, just like a job. It's like a job. I mean, it is a job. It's not like a job, it is a job. Like, anyone listening that works at a company.
00:34:20 --> 00:34:25
Bryan Neale: They might have, you know, exceeds expectations, meets and below expectations, those sorts of things.
00:34:25 --> 00:34:32
Bryan Neale: We get a numerical score that pops out, and then we get put into tiers, and then that's how we get playoff games. And keep our jobs, too.
00:34:32 --> 00:34:32
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah.
00:34:33 --> 00:34:43
Dr. Rob Bell: No, love it, man. And then, what do you think's then the biggest lesson… life lesson, because we talked about it, what's the biggest life lesson, man, that… that you take from…
00:34:43 --> 00:34:48
Dr. Rob Bell: NFL umpiring into… You know, real life.
00:34:48 --> 00:34:53
Bryan Neale: Yeah, there's so many to grab one. I'm gonna grab one, though, that is a hinge moment for me.
00:34:54 --> 00:34:56
Bryan Neale: Is the lesson of, perspective?
00:34:57 --> 00:35:15
Bryan Neale: And that's… it's a very cliche thing to say, but I'm gonna put it into some more… some more definite context. You hear this all the time, and I've lived this. You know, I had that dream, I had that note card written down to rough the Super Bowl. You know, when I was 19, I wrote down that I wanted to rough the Super Bowl when I was 51. I was 19, I had no idea how to do that.
00:35:16 --> 00:35:18
Bryan Neale: And the dream came true, and after the Super Bowl, it was 52.
00:35:19 --> 00:35:23
Bryan Neale: barrel… I mean, right, it's crazy to think about that, how close I was on that thing.
00:35:23 --> 00:35:39
Bryan Neale: And after that, Super Bowl game, I, came, got on the bus, showered up, went back to my hotel. My family wasn't back yet, I was by myself, and all my stuff's cluttered around the hotel room, and I got a check-in for my flight, and I packed my stuff up, and I went home.
00:35:40 --> 00:35:57
Bryan Neale: And I landed in Indianapolis and went to the parking garage and got in my car, drove… it's like, that was it. And so, you hear it so many times, the perspective, like, oh, you got this super… you got the thing, that's not it, man. It just… it's not fulfilling. And you can't… everyone says that, and like, it just isn't.
00:35:58 --> 00:36:00
Bryan Neale: And so that perspective of.
00:36:00 --> 00:36:04
Bryan Neale: this thing, I just am lucky enough to get to be involved in it and with it.
00:36:04 --> 00:36:14
Bryan Neale: from someone who has a deep emotional connection to this game, for a short window of time, and it's lived way before me, it's gonna live way after me. It's so much bigger than me, and us.
00:36:15 --> 00:36:22
Bryan Neale: Demar Hamlin, who's a player who had an incident where he died on the field, collapsed at my feet.
00:36:22 --> 00:36:27
Bryan Neale: And I… and I saw his eyes roll back in the side. It was very… it was very…
00:36:27 --> 00:36:35
Bryan Neale: traumatic thing to see, if you've ever seen someone revived before, who was… who was gone, his heart stopped, and they, thank God, saved his life.
00:36:36 --> 00:36:39
Bryan Neale: That moment, for me was my biggest hinge moment.
00:36:39 --> 00:36:58
Bryan Neale: Where I'm like, this is so much more, and there's so many more important things than me getting upset about a call I missed, or anything like that. Just these life… these life lessons. So, perspective for me is… is very deep with this… with this whole game. And I have to still remind myself of that, but it's,
00:36:58 --> 00:37:00
Bryan Neale: It's a great gift. Great gift.
00:37:01 --> 00:37:04
Dr. Rob Bell: I'm glad you brought that up, man, just… so…
00:37:04 --> 00:37:14
Dr. Rob Bell: Because we think, in our mind, right, like, the mountaintop moment, like, that's gonna… that's all I want, right? Just get up on the mountaintop. But we have to come back off that mountaintop.
00:37:15 --> 00:37:20
Dr. Rob Bell: And… and like you said, right, it's like, and so…
00:37:20 --> 00:37:24
Dr. Rob Bell: It's the experience of it, right? It's like being a part of that experience, that.
00:37:24 --> 00:37:24
Bryan Neale: Yes.
00:37:24 --> 00:37:25
Dr. Rob Bell: most.
00:37:25 --> 00:37:35
Bryan Neale: That's it. Yep. And the before and the after, too. It's that all of it together. It's not the moment, so to speak. And then it's just gone.
00:37:35 --> 00:37:42
Bryan Neale: It's… it goes… you know, and I think of, in my keynote-speaking life, I meet people who've climbed Mount Everest.
00:37:43 --> 00:37:57
Bryan Neale: And they get up there, and then it's miserable. It's absolutely miserable. And you're standing up there, and they're miserable, and they're there for 10-20 minutes, and they're like, alright, let's get the hell out of here. Like, and they gotta climb back down, and that's it. You know what I mean?
00:37:57 --> 00:38:05
Bryan Neale: And I just think of that, but think of all the process that goes in, all the prep, and then all the after process, too.
00:38:05 --> 00:38:09
Bryan Neale: That's what it's about, those experiences, those journeys,
00:38:10 --> 00:38:20
Bryan Neale: the up and the down, and then cataloging those. I'm a big fan of cataloging those stories, though, in your mind, so you don't lose them. I keep real strong mental pictures of
00:38:21 --> 00:38:36
Bryan Neale: Sounds crazy. The… walking out on the field for the Super Bowl and seeing my… my four kids, who were teenagers at the time, still are, late-stage teenagers, not… non-emotive kids, like teenagers, they're jumping up and down.
00:38:36 --> 00:38:41
Bryan Neale: In the stands, and I'm… I take my hat off, I'm jumping up. That moment is in my brain forever.
00:38:41 --> 00:38:44
Dr. Rob Bell: My deathbed, I'll be thinking about that. It's just a huge…
00:38:44 --> 00:38:45
Bryan Neale: Moment for me.
00:38:48 --> 00:38:57
Bryan Neale: I think remembering and having a way to visually catalog those moments in your world, a hinge moment, is really important, so we don't lose them.
00:38:57 --> 00:38:59
Bryan Neale: At a deep level.
00:39:00 --> 00:39:00
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah.
00:39:00 --> 00:39:10
Dr. Rob Bell: How do you, when you talk about after, how do you, like, decompress, de-stress, catalog it? Like, what's your process after games?
00:39:10 --> 00:39:25
Bryan Neale: It's great. So there's the… there's the after games, and there's after season that I like to talk about, too. So there's the… the after game is a lot of process stuff, you know, it's getting the… we gotta put a bunch of, like, paperwork together and watching film.
00:39:25 --> 00:39:30
Bryan Neale: And, I give myself until Wednesday for the look backward.
00:39:30 --> 00:39:48
Bryan Neale: And then the final grades come out, the number's in the books Wednesday evening. That game is over, done, put away. Now we're on to the next week. Now we start looking at the teams, and where we're headed the next week, both the logistics of travel and all that jazz, but also the teams, and where they are, and what they're due, and their tendencies, and things like that.
00:39:49 --> 00:39:59
Bryan Neale: And that's a rinse-repeat. It's very process-oriented. I always tell people, if you ever go to… and then I… when I was in the Big Ten, I used to ref… A lot of NFL teams have referees come to practice.
00:39:59 --> 00:40:17
Bryan Neale: their game prep practice, because they want to simulate, you know, real situations. I say if you've ever been to a NFL practice, especially late in the season, it is so boring, because they do the same thing over and over and over. And you're like, this is it? I'm like, this is it, man. They do the same thing every day.
00:40:18 --> 00:40:26
Bryan Neale: Because that's… they're chasing perfect, and that's how you do that. So that's the kind of in-season thing. It's a very rinse-repeat road.
00:40:26 --> 00:40:26
Dr. Rob Bell: Yep.
00:40:26 --> 00:40:27
Bryan Neale: postseason.
00:40:29 --> 00:40:35
Bryan Neale: I've, I've, I saw a speaker give me a model, in a peer group I'm in about,
00:40:36 --> 00:40:47
Bryan Neale: a kind of a flow, and he talked about, like, when you're… you have stress on the y-axis, and productivity on the x-axis, or flipped, either one.
00:40:48 --> 00:40:56
Bryan Neale: And when your stress is moderate, and your performance is high, it's peak performance time. Stress moderate, performance high.
00:40:56 --> 00:41:02
Bryan Neale: When you come off of that, where stress goes high, performance drops, that's your burnout phase.
00:41:02 --> 00:41:21
Bryan Neale: But then you move into this rust phase, where your stress is low, and your performance is low. You're sort of just like… and so I hit rust phase about 2 weeks after the season, where I texted one of my referee buddies, two weeks after the season, and I said, I…
00:41:21 --> 00:41:27
Bryan Neale: I count my steps. I think I had, like, 980 steps that day, and I sat on the couch almost for 6 hours.
00:41:27 --> 00:41:29
Dr. Rob Bell: Just dead.
00:41:29 --> 00:41:31
Bryan Neale: Emotionally, mentally, everything.
00:41:31 --> 00:41:35
Bryan Neale: And so now I just… I think in the past, I used to fight through that.
00:41:35 --> 00:41:38
Bryan Neale: Right, say, oh my god, I'm lazy, I gotta get up and go, you know?
00:41:38 --> 00:41:50
Bryan Neale: And that's part of my, kind of, part of my bad wiring. I've got to learn to just let that be. And my body needs that, my soul needs that, my mind needs that. It's okay to sit there. It's okay to sit there.
00:41:50 --> 00:41:55
Bryan Neale: And that's become a new part of my post-season recovery, to give myself a little grace.
00:41:55 --> 00:42:05
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah, that's a good one, man. Because, you know, being a high performer like yourself, like… but we don't, we don't… like, nothing rusts from one day to the next. I mean, that's a process.
00:42:05 --> 00:42:08
Bryan Neale: That's true, good point, yes, yes, that's really good.
00:42:08 --> 00:42:13
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah, so, yeah, so, yeah, I don't sit there for 6 months on the couch. Sure. Yes.
00:42:13 --> 00:42:17
Bryan Neale: But there is this thing when you're running and charging hard.
00:42:17 --> 00:42:21
Bryan Neale: That, you know, you can lose sight of the perspective thing.
00:42:22 --> 00:42:28
Bryan Neale: You know, whether it's my health, or my relationships, or something, I've got to take inventory of those things and go, you know what?
00:42:29 --> 00:42:31
Bryan Neale: This is, it's not healthy where it is.
00:42:31 --> 00:42:36
Dr. Rob Bell: So, in your keynote speaking, I mean, one of your talks, the joy of being yelled at.
00:42:39 --> 00:42:41
Bryan Neale: That's a life lesson.
00:42:41 --> 00:42:42
Bryan Neale: That's good.
00:42:43 --> 00:42:46
Bryan Neale: My little, phrase I use.
00:42:47 --> 00:42:55
Bryan Neale: I love people, and I love to connect with people. And I'm working on it, but I like… I don't like when people don't like me.
00:42:56 --> 00:42:57
Bryan Neale: Just don't.
00:42:57 --> 00:42:59
Bryan Neale: I don't mind conflict at all.
00:42:59 --> 00:43:03
Bryan Neale: But I don't like when people carry it past that, like, I just don't like that guy.
00:43:03 --> 00:43:13
Bryan Neale: I want everyone… I want to just be someone that, like, lifts people up. And you have to… and I don't have to be, like, the tip-top, oh, he's the greatest guy I've met, not that, but just, like, like, being around that guy. It's good, makes me feel good.
00:43:13 --> 00:43:13
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah.
00:43:13 --> 00:43:14
Bryan Neale: kind of energy.
00:43:15 --> 00:43:17
Bryan Neale: And… then I go into refereeing.
00:43:17 --> 00:43:24
Bryan Neale: As soon as you put the shirt on, everyone hates you. Everyone. And I'm like, what is this about? You know, and I'm self-psychoanalyzing myself.
00:43:24 --> 00:43:28
Bryan Neale: But there's something about the test of putting that shirt on.
00:43:29 --> 00:43:39
Bryan Neale: And performing their way, and still people like, guy's good. I'll tell you, you know, he pissed me off a couple times in the game, but he's good. I'll take it. So I say they're yelling at the shirt, they're not yelling at me.
00:43:39 --> 00:43:42
Dr. Rob Bell: Try to try to move that… I'm in that role.
00:43:42 --> 00:43:49
Bryan Neale: And I think that's a good perspective switch for people sometimes to think about in your job or your relationship with your spouse.
00:43:50 --> 00:43:54
Bryan Neale: You know, sometimes they're not mad at what we think they're mad at.
00:43:54 --> 00:44:05
Bryan Neale: You know? There's something deeper than that, and that's been really helpful, for me to say, you know what? They're mad at this shirt. I worked a game, college game at, Iowa.
00:44:05 --> 00:44:10
Bryan Neale: And, after the game, I went to this little restaurant, and there's one guy sitting at the bar.
00:44:11 --> 00:44:30
Bryan Neale: And the bartender, and they were talking, and I was just sitting at a table off… off to the side, and they're bitching about the refs, and I just worked the game. And so I hopped… I didn't say who I was, I had a suit on, I didn't know, you know… I'm like, what happened? They're like, okay. I didn't say, you know, so I started talking to them. I didn't say anything about me, what I did.
00:44:30 --> 00:44:34
Bryan Neale: And then I'm like, alright, I'll go grab my flight. Like, alright, have a good day, buddy, see you later, you know?
00:44:34 --> 00:44:39
Bryan Neale: And I'm like, they don't know who I am. It's great. If they had told them, they would have been mad at me, so it's just funny.
00:44:40 --> 00:44:51
Dr. Rob Bell: It's… from an NFL coaching perspective, like, with MLB umpires now, like, a big process of what their training is handling
00:44:51 --> 00:44:52
Dr. Rob Bell: managers.
00:44:52 --> 00:44:53
Bryan Neale: Yeah.
00:44:53 --> 00:45:03
Dr. Rob Bell: And again, baseball's a little bit different, because there's not a lot of hard sidelines there, but, like, there's a tact that good NFL coaches take when it comes to.
00:45:03 --> 00:45:07
Bryan Neale: the umpires and the communication, don't you agree? 100%, yeah. I liked,
00:45:08 --> 00:45:16
Bryan Neale: You know, we all are doing this for, on one hand, our own reason, but in the grand scheme, it's all for the same thing.
00:45:16 --> 00:45:21
Bryan Neale: We were in a competitive environment with a game that we love, and everybody wants to perform well.
00:45:21 --> 00:45:37
Bryan Neale: And at the end, there's a winner and a loser. And for whatever reason, whoever's involved with that, we love that. I love that, they love that, and we want the same thing. I want players to be safe, number one. They want players to be safe, so do the players. I hope the fans do, too. And they want the game to be played clean and fair. That's it.
00:45:37 --> 00:45:45
Bryan Neale: And they do too, and I do too. So we all want the same thing. I think we forget that sometimes. We're all after the exact same end outcome.
00:45:45 --> 00:45:50
Bryan Neale: And all of us make mistakes toward the end outcome. Every single human involved in that game does.
00:45:50 --> 00:46:06
Bryan Neale: And so, we're just all trying to minimize our mistakes. That's what we're doing. So we're all doing the same thing. So we look at it that way, and they're upset with us. I know why they're upset, because they're also upset at their… maybe the receiver, or their offensive line coach, and they're upset with me, too. And I'm upset with me, too, or whatever, you know, it's like that.
00:46:06 --> 00:46:12
Bryan Neale: So just think of it that way, and once that… once you get that in your head, those…
00:46:13 --> 00:46:21
Bryan Neale: interactions change a bit. You actually have an… it sounds almost weird to say, you have an empathy
00:46:21 --> 00:46:22
Bryan Neale: For them when they're upset.
00:46:23 --> 00:46:42
Bryan Neale: Because you understand what's at stake here, and you understand what you signed up for. Now, I'm absolutely no perfection guy at this. You know, I've got my… I get wound up, and I lose my stuff, and it happens. But I have to reflect on that, part of the game evaluation. How could I have handled that conversation differently?
00:46:43 --> 00:46:52
Bryan Neale: Apologize when I need to apologize if I was wrong, which I'll do absolutely without question. If I, you know, make a mistake or say something I shouldn't have said, I'll say sorry and move on.
00:46:52 --> 00:46:55
Dr. Rob Bell: And is that, like, a call, too? Like, if you know you missed one? Like…
00:46:55 --> 00:47:00
Bryan Neale: I, I… if… not… I… like, I would never…
00:47:01 --> 00:47:15
Bryan Neale: let a call stand that I know I missed. I would always correct that in the moment. Now, there's gonna be a debate after that, and then the end… so the little phrase we have, I say to some people, is don't wrestle with a pig in the mud, because sooner or later you'll realize the pig likes it.
00:47:15 --> 00:47:26
Bryan Neale: I just don't argue. At some point, we're gonna both watch the film, and I'm gonna get graded, and I'm gonna be right or wrong, or you're gonna be right or wrong. And then the argument's basically over.
00:47:28 --> 00:47:36
Bryan Neale: And the game is so complicated, they really don't have time to harp on us. They have so many things going on. They don't want to talk to us.
00:47:36 --> 00:47:38
Dr. Rob Bell: Right. The play sheets are, you know…
00:47:38 --> 00:47:46
Bryan Neale: like a… I mean, like, phone book, it's, you know, we don't have those anymore, but, you know, it's, like, so complicated. They don't want to mess with us.
00:47:46 --> 00:47:47
Bryan Neale: So…
00:47:47 --> 00:47:49
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah, no, good point, man.
00:47:49 --> 00:47:53
Dr. Rob Bell: I mean, your, your podcast, man, you've been running that.
00:47:54 --> 00:47:57
Dr. Rob Bell: Jeez, I mean, over 18 years, is it over 20 years now?
00:47:57 --> 00:48:01
Bryan Neale: It'll be 19 years, coming up, I think October 6th might have been our.
00:48:02 --> 00:48:03
Dr. Rob Bell: Even Bill?
00:48:03 --> 00:48:05
Bryan Neale: That's what I think. Me and Bill Caskey, yeah, the Advanced Selling.
00:48:05 --> 00:48:05
Dr. Rob Bell: I know Bill.
00:48:05 --> 00:48:07
Bryan Neale: Of course you do, I know you do.
00:48:07 --> 00:48:08
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah, yeah, feels good, dude.
00:48:08 --> 00:48:09
Bryan Neale: For sure. Yeah.
00:48:10 --> 00:48:11
Dr. Rob Bell: Okay.
00:48:11 --> 00:48:12
Bryan Neale: We love it. We love it.
00:48:12 --> 00:48:13
Dr. Rob Bell: So…
00:48:14 --> 00:48:22
Dr. Rob Bell: When was that moment where we realized, like, hey, we're not only producing main value here, but we can also generate a business from this?
00:48:22 --> 00:48:29
Bryan Neale: Yes. I'm fact-checking myself. October 24th, 2006 was episode 1.
00:48:29 --> 00:48:36
Bryan Neale: Well, Bill and I were both radio geeks in high school and college.
00:48:36 --> 00:48:39
Bryan Neale: So I was in a Boy Scout
00:48:39 --> 00:48:49
Bryan Neale: Explorers Troop at our local radio station in Newburgh, Indiana. We got to go do production and be on the air, and I loved it. Bill majored in TV radio at DePaul University.
00:48:50 --> 00:48:54
Bryan Neale: We started working together, and we got a chance to have a radio show here in Indianapolis.
00:48:54 --> 00:49:14
Bryan Neale: on 1430 WXNT, which is now mostly a sports show, but it was a news station back then. And we were on noon to 1 Saturdays, which, if you look at Nielsen ratings, noon to 1 Saturday time slot on radio is the lowest listened to hour the entire 7 days, 24. No one listens to radio. They're like, you guys can have it, go ahead, no one's listening. I'm like, alright, sweet.
00:49:14 --> 00:49:19
Bryan Neale: So we did that for a while, we loved it. It's called Business 360 Business Show. We loved it.
00:49:20 --> 00:49:21
Bryan Neale: We just had fun doing it.
00:49:22 --> 00:49:33
Bryan Neale: I was rough in college football then, so Bill would have to carry the show basically the whole fall, and it just got to be a grind for him, you know, it just wasn't clicking. At the time,
00:49:33 --> 00:49:46
Bryan Neale: podcasting was just in its early infancy stage, and Bill came to me one day and said, have you heard of this thing called podcasting? I'm like, no. Because it's basically a radio show for an iPod. This is back in the old days of iPods.
00:49:46 --> 00:50:01
Bryan Neale: He goes, yeah, you basically just record it, and convert it to a digital MP4, MP3, and then you upload it, and people can listen to it. And it's real buzzy in Australia and England. I'm like, oh, that's sweet, let's try it. So we bought a couple microphones, and sat in the office, and just started recording shows.
00:50:02 --> 00:50:13
Bryan Neale: And, you know, people started emailing us, and mostly… podcasts blew up outside the U.S. before it blew up in the U.S, so we started to get people from, like, all these places. Here's where it hit me. This is the hinge moment.
00:50:14 --> 00:50:24
Bryan Neale: we put a little LinkedIn group together, so we got, you know, maybe, I don't know, 600-800 people, in this LinkedIn group. And I had a business trip that I was going to London for, to England.
00:50:25 --> 00:50:39
Bryan Neale: And I went down, I emailed every person in that group that listened to our podcast in this LinkedIn group we had, and said, hey, I'm gonna be at the Intercontinental, Hotel at Heathrow Airport at 6 o'clock on Thursday, I'll buy the first beer.
00:50:39 --> 00:50:42
Bryan Neale: That was my thing. Like, okey-dokey.
00:50:42 --> 00:50:45
Bryan Neale: Like, 16 people showed up.
00:50:45 --> 00:50:46
Dr. Rob Bell: Nice.
00:50:46 --> 00:50:55
Bryan Neale: I'm like, from one email. And I'm in England, at London, at Heathrow. I'm like, what? And then it was weird, here was the weird part then.
00:50:55 --> 00:51:02
Bryan Neale: it was like… they're like, I can't believe I'm meeting you. To me. And I'm like, huh? I'm like, I'm B. Neil, man. I'm like…
00:51:03 --> 00:51:18
Bryan Neale: But it… I'm like, wow, this is a thing, you know? The voice that you have, and it was, it was, it was wild. And that's when I'm like, hmm, this is something. And then, this is a great little lesson for listeners. Everyone wants to know the secret to podcasting.
00:51:18 --> 00:51:23
Bryan Neale: There's two secrets, and they're magic BBs. First secret is start.
00:51:23 --> 00:51:25
Bryan Neale: And the second secret is never stop.
00:51:26 --> 00:51:32
Bryan Neale: That's it. If you do those two things, podcasts will be a favorable thing in your life, I guarantee it. Just start, and then don't stop.
00:51:33 --> 00:51:33
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah.
00:51:33 --> 00:51:33
Bryan Neale: For sure.
00:51:33 --> 00:51:34
Dr. Rob Bell: We're the key to life there, man.
00:51:34 --> 00:51:36
Bryan Neale: That's it, right? It's pretty straightforward.
00:51:37 --> 00:51:37
Dr. Rob Bell: Game of attrition.
00:51:37 --> 00:51:38
Bryan Neale: That's right.
00:51:39 --> 00:51:43
Dr. Rob Bell: What, you know, with your audience, though, what's…
00:51:43 --> 00:51:52
Dr. Rob Bell: you've had, I mean, so much interaction with them, and I know, like, your funnel from there into actual coaching, but, like, what's their main pain point that you've come across?
00:51:53 --> 00:51:58
Bryan Neale: The… I think it's the evolution now, especially now,
00:51:59 --> 00:52:06
Bryan Neale: It's the… it's the evolution of all things. The acceleration of innovation is the thing.
00:52:07 --> 00:52:23
Bryan Neale: Because all of a sudden, now all of a sudden, we've got AI agents that can do all sorts of things that salespeople couldn't do, and now people used to not even know what LinkedIn was, and now it can be the primary way to find, you know, people and interactions and relationships. So, I think that accelerated innovation.
00:52:23 --> 00:52:25
Dr. Rob Bell: part, is people want to make sure.
00:52:25 --> 00:52:34
Bryan Neale: they're staying at the front edge. I think that's one of the things that Bill and I do and like to do, is we like to go find things and bring them to people.
00:52:34 --> 00:52:41
Bryan Neale: Before, you know, like having a podcast. Like, we've been talking to salespeople, you should have a podcast if you're a salesperson.
00:52:41 --> 00:52:56
Bryan Neale: And we're just now starting to get listeners, like, hey, I did a whole little thing. I had two or three of my clients that just started to just release their first episodes. I'm like, you go, good. I gave a speech a couple weeks ago, I gave away some podcasting equipment in my speech.
00:52:56 --> 00:53:02
Bryan Neale: I said, first hit, man, just start, get the equipment. Here, I bought it for you, I gave someone a present on stage. So…
00:53:02 --> 00:53:16
Bryan Neale: I… and their pain point is people listen because they want… it's an easy, on-demand way to find things that can help them in their life. For salespeople, that to me is about what's next? I don't want to be irrelevant here.
00:53:16 --> 00:53:20
Bryan Neale: I want to make sure I stay and get… stay on the front edge of things.
00:53:20 --> 00:53:20
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah.
00:53:21 --> 00:53:22
Dr. Rob Bell: No, I love that, man.
00:53:22 --> 00:53:23
Bryan Neale: Yeah.
00:53:23 --> 00:53:28
Dr. Rob Bell: And… And with that, Brian, let me… one more question, man, like…
00:53:28 --> 00:53:29
Bryan Neale: Good.
00:53:29 --> 00:53:39
Dr. Rob Bell: If you had to boil mental toughness down, man, to, like, one principle that you think applies universally, right, it's ubiquitous. Like, what would you say, man, their, that principle would be?
00:53:40 --> 00:53:44
Bryan Neale: I'm gonna tell you the first thing that popped in my head. Acceptance.
00:53:44 --> 00:53:45
Bryan Neale: Yeah. Acceptance.
00:53:46 --> 00:53:56
Bryan Neale: I have to, as a high-performance athlete person, accept all things. I have to accept success, have to accept failure, I have to accept pain.
00:53:57 --> 00:54:00
Bryan Neale: I have to accept healing. I have to accept training.
00:54:00 --> 00:54:03
Bryan Neale: I have to accept… My body changing?
00:54:03 --> 00:54:04
Bryan Neale: Is that age?
00:54:05 --> 00:54:16
Bryan Neale: If I can accept those things, I think I can really stay in a high-performance world. If I move against those things, or repel them, or fight them, I think it's wasted energy.
00:54:17 --> 00:54:21
Dr. Rob Bell: So, acceptance is the key to all my problems today, like…
00:54:22 --> 00:54:35
Dr. Rob Bell: what is… like, give me an example. How does that manifest, then, in your life, where… because people that are hearing it are gonna be like, yeah, of course, and then to be able to move on, but, like, how does that apply? Like, what's an example for you?
00:54:35 --> 00:54:49
Bryan Neale: Yeah, I mean, it's the biggest and the smallest things. One of my dear friends, a guy who was in my first wedding, and his dad was a mentor of mine, a second father figure to me, passed away. I'm going to a celebration of life next week.
00:54:50 --> 00:54:54
Bryan Neale: And I got to thinking about that, and I thought, man.
00:54:54 --> 00:54:57
Bryan Neale: his name is Tom. I said, when Tom…
00:54:57 --> 00:55:08
Bryan Neale: was, like, mentoring us when we were coming up through refereeing. He was 54 or 55. I'm 54-55. He just died, and it seemed like I blinked
00:55:08 --> 00:55:12
Bryan Neale: I have to accept that, that I'm on the back nine. I have to accept that.
00:55:12 --> 00:55:22
Bryan Neale: My daughter got rear-ended, I told you that, this morning on her way to work. She's, like, visualizing, oh, I'm gonna have a great Monday, whatever, and everything, and then she got rear-ended. We'd have to accept that.
00:55:23 --> 00:55:28
Bryan Neale: We just have to accept, my sister just had, a brain tumor removed.
00:55:29 --> 00:55:30
Bryan Neale: Three weeks ago.
00:55:30 --> 00:55:44
Bryan Neale: And she is… I wouldn't put… she's not, like, a… like a high-performance athlete. She's been so inspiring to me, of just accepting her circumstance, and like, yeah, and so positive about… not positive, like, oh, everything's fine.
00:55:44 --> 00:55:48
Bryan Neale: Like, no, it sucks, but she can accept it and be that.
00:55:48 --> 00:55:55
Bryan Neale: So it's those… I always think people understand acceptance, but the question is, do they practice it, and then how do they practice it?
00:55:55 --> 00:55:56
Bryan Neale: How do they practice it?
00:55:57 --> 00:56:01
Bryan Neale: And, for me, it takes, you know, depending upon what it is, it could take a lot of work.
00:56:02 --> 00:56:09
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah, because, I mean, you can easily just get stuck, right? Like, especially the two types of problems. Problems that are caused by me.
00:56:10 --> 00:56:13
Dr. Rob Bell: And then cause… and then there are problems that are done to me.
00:56:13 --> 00:56:14
Bryan Neale: Oh, that's great. Yes.
00:56:14 --> 00:56:15
Dr. Rob Bell: and…
00:56:15 --> 00:56:23
Dr. Rob Bell: you know, sometimes those things that are, you know, back to officiate, right? Like, we want something that's fair. That's the beauty about sports. That's the thing I love about it.
00:56:23 --> 00:56:26
Bryan Neale: Yep. Is there's so much ambiguity in life.
00:56:26 --> 00:56:39
Dr. Rob Bell: That, you know, it's… there's just so much gray in it. With the sports aspect, I think that's what people get away from. With sports, that's the one thing that we like, is there is a winner, and there's a loser, and you catch the ball, or you didn't catch the ball.
00:56:39 --> 00:56:39
Bryan Neale: That's it.
00:56:40 --> 00:56:41
Bryan Neale: That's literally it.
00:56:41 --> 00:56:45
Dr. Rob Bell: So when things are done to us, though, there's, like, this un… that was unfair.
00:56:45 --> 00:56:46
Bryan Neale: Yes.
00:56:47 --> 00:56:52
Dr. Rob Bell: And it seems to be, like, with the acceptance piece, that seems to be where people can get stuck, me included.
00:56:53 --> 00:57:04
Bryan Neale: Yeah, oh, 100%. I mean, I know we… I love the, saying from a… there's a book by Richard Bott called Illusions. He says, I don't know if he's the only one that said it, but we teach best what we most need to learn.
00:57:04 --> 00:57:11
Bryan Neale: I love that concept. We teach best what we most need to learn, and that's definitely a thing for me, is to accept life on life's terms, and like, okay.
00:57:11 --> 00:57:12
Bryan Neale: This is the thing.
00:57:12 --> 00:57:14
Bryan Neale: This is the thing.
00:57:14 --> 00:57:14
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah.
00:57:14 --> 00:57:26
Bryan Neale: And it's also… there's a logic part to it, like, what do you… it's done. It's like, you can't… you can't have re… done something in the… undone something that happened already. You can't. You can only do something forward.
00:57:28 --> 00:57:32
Dr. Rob Bell: Brian, what question, man, that I'm missing that, that I haven't asked?
00:57:33 --> 00:57:42
Bryan Neale: I'm always interested in… What happens after you achieve a big goal?
00:57:42 --> 00:57:49
Dr. Rob Bell: And I'd love your take on this one, because I want to tell you my experience, but you as a sports psychologist, someone that works with a lot of high-performing people, and you get, you know, a PhD in it, and…
00:57:49 --> 00:57:55
Bryan Neale: Study it, one thing I noticed when I… after I worked the Super Bowl.
00:57:56 --> 00:57:58
Bryan Neale: Is I didn't have anything after that.
00:57:58 --> 00:58:00
Bryan Neale: And I blew in the wind.
00:58:00 --> 00:58:08
Bryan Neale: the next season, I'm telling you. I blew in the wind. I just didn't… it just felt funny. And I've readjusted that, but how do you coach someone
00:58:08 --> 00:58:10
Bryan Neale: And what do you do?
00:58:10 --> 00:58:16
Bryan Neale: after they hit that big goal. So the person that climbs Mount Everest, They did that thing.
00:58:16 --> 00:58:22
Bryan Neale: That's a big hole now. They've been working on that for months and months and months, right? You know, I boom them, you know.
00:58:22 --> 00:58:31
Bryan Neale: I win my first tour, you know, championship on my first green jacket, and then what? You know? So how do you coach people
00:58:31 --> 00:58:34
Bryan Neale: Pass the… past the success of the thing.
00:58:36 --> 00:58:37
Bryan Neale: It's always interesting to me.
00:58:37 --> 00:58:40
Dr. Rob Bell: Yeah, I agree, man. I'm kind of going through it right now, man, like…
00:58:40 --> 00:58:40
Bryan Neale: Mmm.
00:58:41 --> 00:58:49
Dr. Rob Bell: You know, I had an ultramarathon, the goal was 150 miles, but stabbing pain, like, in my foot, about mile 60, so I was able to make it to 100.
00:58:50 --> 00:58:55
Dr. Rob Bell: And, you know, at mile 80, I'm just like, look, we gotta reevaluate the goal, there's, I mean…
00:58:55 --> 00:58:56
Bryan Neale: This is…
00:58:56 --> 00:59:01
Dr. Rob Bell: This is killing me, like, there's a lot of pain, but it wasn't anything we ever prepped for, so there was…
00:59:01 --> 00:59:13
Dr. Rob Bell: But after… there's so many details. There's so much preparation that goes into it, you know? And then me being me, like, you know, the family was a big part of this, and like, I don't want to stress them out, but there's just…
00:59:14 --> 00:59:24
Dr. Rob Bell: you always want to take care of all the details that you can, and so after that, like, I did what… what you were kind of talking about. I mean, I allowed myself this past week to…
00:59:24 --> 00:59:30
Dr. Rob Bell: De-stress, decompress, evaluate, and then it's… You know.
00:59:32 --> 00:59:35
Dr. Rob Bell: You, you, you pick another mountaintop.
00:59:36 --> 00:59:52
Dr. Rob Bell: I mean, you pick another goal, you pick something else that's gonna be energizing to you, that you want to put forth your effort and energy into it, because, yeah, man, like, Everest, right, takes weeks of actual climbing, man. A lot of scratch, and you're up at the top for a matter of moments, man. You gotta come back down.
00:59:52 --> 00:59:53
Bryan Neale: Yep, yep.
00:59:54 --> 00:59:57
Bryan Neale: And I love the engaging in a new process.
00:59:58 --> 01:00:00
Bryan Neale: That fulfills you.
01:00:00 --> 01:00:09
Bryan Neale: That, to me, is the next thing, more than the next, like, big goal, like, oh, I want to free four Super Bowls, like, I want to put myself into some sort of process that moves
01:00:10 --> 01:00:13
Bryan Neale: Right. Moves my, you know, energy level up.
01:00:14 --> 01:00:15
Bryan Neale: Internally.
01:00:15 --> 01:00:19
Dr. Rob Bell: And that's a piece, too, where, especially after that, like,
01:00:20 --> 01:00:35
Dr. Rob Bell: how can we stay consistent? Because consistency is the hallmark of greatness. And are there other areas still in your life where you just have to keep being consistent? Yeah. That's the part I look at. I mean, nobody wants somebody that's gonna show up as great one day and horrible the next.
01:00:35 --> 01:00:37
Bryan Neale: Right, right, absolutely.
01:00:37 --> 01:00:43
Dr. Rob Bell: So, it's like, man, how can we stay consistent? And the order I get, man, it's just, man, the level of details, right?
01:00:43 --> 01:00:44
Bryan Neale: Yes.
01:00:44 --> 01:00:45
Dr. Rob Bell: Level of details.
01:00:45 --> 01:00:48
Bryan Neale: Yes, and those details matter so much at scale.
01:00:49 --> 01:00:50
Dr. Rob Bell: And I'm not a details guy.
01:00:50 --> 01:00:55
Bryan Neale: Right, same, same here. Same here. That's amazing.
01:00:55 --> 01:00:57
Bryan Neale: 100 miles, you ran 100 miles.
01:00:58 --> 01:01:08
Dr. Rob Bell: And… and here's the thing, though, Brian, it was like, everyone was like… and it was 100 miles in 24 hours, everyone was like, man, wait, like, great job. Part of me was… it was sad. I was disappointed, because that wasn't the goal, man.
01:01:08 --> 01:01:10
Bryan Neale: Right, right.
01:01:10 --> 01:01:20
Dr. Rob Bell: wasn't the goal. And so, I needed coaching, I needed to talk to people, and they said, look, man, you can't be… if you can't be happy with the race you planned, be happy with the race that you did.
01:01:20 --> 01:01:21
Bryan Neale: Okay.
01:01:22 --> 01:01:23
Bryan Neale: Like that, yeah.
01:01:23 --> 01:01:28
Dr. Rob Bell: And, you know, I was wondering, man, I was like, why is there… why is there emptiness here? Like, I understand…
01:01:28 --> 01:01:28
Bryan Neale: And,
01:01:28 --> 01:01:35
Dr. Rob Bell: on top, but why is it on tennis? And part was, it's like, well, the goal wasn't reached, man. Like, at no point did I ever consider
01:01:36 --> 01:01:39
Dr. Rob Bell: You're gonna have stabbing pain in your foot.
01:01:39 --> 01:01:40
Bryan Neale: Right, right.
01:01:40 --> 01:01:45
Dr. Rob Bell: And not be able to… A couple factors went into it, and it's just.
01:01:46 --> 01:01:54
Bryan Neale: At mile 80. There's not too many people get to say that, Rob. Not too many people say, well, I was at mile 80, and I got this stepping bait in my foot.
01:01:55 --> 01:01:56
Bryan Neale: That's interesting.
01:01:57 --> 01:02:00
Dr. Rob Bell: But that's the one thing, man, I'm good at, is just keep going, right?
01:02:00 --> 01:02:01
Bryan Neale: I love it.
01:02:01 --> 01:02:03
Dr. Rob Bell: There were people that dropped at 85, and…
01:02:03 --> 01:02:07
Dr. Rob Bell: And no… no way was I gonna not hit something.
01:02:07 --> 01:02:09
Bryan Neale: There you go. 100 miles.
01:02:10 --> 01:02:11
Dr. Rob Bell: I'm glad we got to do this, though, man.
01:02:11 --> 01:02:13
Bryan Neale: It's awesome, dude. Appreciate you having me on.
01:02:13 --> 01:02:18
Dr. Rob Bell: Absolutely. Brian, thank you so much, man, and just really appreciate you.
01:02:18 --> 01:02:19
Bryan Neale: Appreciate you too, bro.