#182: What You Can Learn from Baseball’s Elite with Dr. Kimberly Wagner

Welcome back to another edition of the Course Creation Incubator podcast. I’m your host, Gina Onativia, here to inspire you to take action, to work on your course or your online program and help you build up the online based business of your dreams. Now, did you brains storm your course or next offer topic from last week? I had a ton of fun doing that workshop and I’m hoping you brought together all of your brainstorms, all the different ideas that have been swirling around your head, and you brought them into one brilliant concept and priority course.

Did you do your homework? Did you download the PDF that went with that episode? If you didn’t go back and listen. Download the PDF and do the work. I want you to move forward with that great idea and also have an idea if it’s going to generate revenue for you. I want to make sure you have the pulse of your audience, your buying audience, in order to move forward.

So go back, check that out. I’ll link to it in the show notes. And today, I’ve got a special guest who’s going to teach us how to bring out the best in us. So I’ve been talking about my ten year old Tristan and how he plays junior team tennis. We love tennis here. We watch it all the time and we’re always asking what makes the difference between elite tennis players, people like Serena, Roger, Joker, who just dominate and those who can’t crack.

So the top 200. We’re always talking about it in my household. And also it’s Padre season and Tristen has the baseball bug, and now so do I. I’m a Yankees fan by trade and by birth. So we’re talking baseball a lot. And it’s great timing because Dr. Kimberly Wagner is on today to talk through what makes a difference between the elite, those at the top and then the rest.

And I know Dr. Wagner because she approached me about a done for you. Course, this was over a year ago and I got to work on believe it achieve it with her. And it was an incredible experience and I wanted her on not just to talk about her course creation experience because I love hearing those stories. Everyone’s story is so unique.

We’ll talk a little bit about her course creation. We’ll talk about her launch and how she’s working to put her brand out there in a bigger way. I’m excited to have Dr. Wagner on because she’s going to talk through how do you go from being average to being one of the best in whatever you do? And this translates from baseball to tennis to course creation to business.

And she trains some of the best out there to make sure that they’re going to the next level, that they haven’t plateaued. They continue to grow. They continue to scale their business. So who better to come talk to us about our own course creation than Dr. Wagner? So you’re going to hear her one talk about top performance. Then you’re going to hear her about her course creation journey.

And of course, this episode is brought to you by my Done for You services. We take one or two entrepreneurs and small business owners a quarter. If you’d like to apply its course creation bootcamp slash course and it’s an awesome process. We went through it with Dr. Wagner and had an absolute blast in terms of her course. So without further ado, let’s get to Dr. Wagner telling us how we can really raise the bar on what we’re doing.

Dr. Wagner, welcome to the podcast. Such a thrill to have you here. Thank you so much for having me, Gina. So first and foremost, take me back to when you were thinking about doing the online course. Where did the idea come from? So I’ve always been extremely passionate about what I do, and I’ve always been passionate about helping people.

That’s the most rewarding part about my job. But being in a private practice setting, there’s only so many hours a week that I can see people. And so it was actually the suggestion of one of my clients that I create this online course so that I can help people. But on a much grander scale. I love that. And was a suggestion kind of like, Hey, Dr. Wagner, you’re in demand right now.

You could do all these passive, all things and reach all these other people with an online course. I’m just curious how kind of it was brought up. Yeah, so it was that, but it was also just the experience that this client had had with me. And he had said, You know what, You should make yourself available to everyone because everyone could benefit from working with you.

Okay, I love this. You should make yourself available to everyone like y y. Only this limited number of people get access to you. And what if you get your great content out in a bigger way? Love that ugly woman. And what made you think then I need some help doing this? Because a lot of time there’s a lot of DIY courses out there.

Dr. Wagner, as you know. Right. Like you can I have a course on courses? She’s. But what made you think I need to hire some help? I need to get some coaching on this. So I definitely feel like I know what I’m good at, but I also know what I’m not good at. And so I needed somebody to help me because I had never done anything like this before.

And I needed the guidance. I really needed like the hand-holding in this process. And then also I was just really impressed with some of the courses that you had shown me that you had done for some of the other people that you had worked with. And it was just really professional and something that I probably could never have created on my own.

And just thinking about that criteria, when you’re hiring someone, like when you’re hiring consultant like that, like what were your top two or three criteria like this is and maybe it was experience or other models, right? Or some what had come before you, but what was going through your mind? Like, these are my top or top two or three priorities when hiring.

Okay. So you were actually referred to me by a colleague of mine. So getting that personal referral, I already knew that your work was going to be at a certain level and at a certain standard. So to me, getting that personal referral was really important. I also liked your style. I feel like your style of working, but also your style of esthetics.

And what we wanted to accomplish were similar, and so I knew that we would work well together. I also really liked your personality. I thought you were easy to talk to and easy to work with, and that was really important for me. For me as well. Okay. I love that. And let’s talk a little bit about the course we haven’t jumped in and talk about.

Believe it achieve it yet. What is your mission overall with the course like what are you you say believe it achieve it. What does that mean? What’s the mission of the course? So I think a lot of times people, they hold back on things and there are different reasons why they don’t try to improve themselves or progress in their life.

Maybe they feel like they can’t. Maybe they feel like it’s too hard. Maybe the motivation isn’t there. And what believe it achieve it is about is it’s teaching people that, you know what? If you have these goals that you want in your life to achieve, you can do it. And here’s a step by step guide on how exactly you can do that.

And so I guide them through and I talk about things like motivation. I talk about things like self-confidence. I talk about things like goals, and those are all barriers that people had that prevent them from trying to improve themselves. And what do you think is the biggest challenge holding people back? You were saying that they don’t make progress.

What what’s holding people back in your mind in terms of professionally? What was the. Often what I see is it’s a lack of self-confidence. They just don’t think that they can do it. And it’s interesting because a lot of times they will have people around them that do believe in them and that do have confidence and that. But if you don’t have confidence in yourself, then it doesn’t matter who’s confident in you.

So you first have to build up that confidence in yourself, believe that you can do it, believe that you can do it, and then you have the opportunity to be able to achieve it. Now, one of the things that I love about the course is how you break down the information so we can all understand that. It reminds me of my old boss, Tony Robbins, a little bit.

And what do you think is the secret sauce? Why do you think the course is so effective? So the course is based off of two things. It’s based off of the research that I did that when I was a graduate student, and it was also based off of the ten plus years that I had in experience and working with people in my private practice.

And so the different modules and the different lessons are based off of different findings from my dissertation research. So the the information that is in there is not only backed by research, but then also tested in clinical practice to prove that that it works. Tell me a little bit about that research. Like, take me back to that study.

So when I was in graduate school, I was in a program for clinical psychology and one of the professors at my school, he at the time was the psychologist for the San Diego Chargers. And so growing up, being an athlete and being passionate about that and then being very passionate about psychology and wanting to help people, I thought that was kind of the perfect thing for me, was combining sports and psychology.

And so this professor had done a informal research study with the San Diego Chargers just looking at mental skills and characteristics that enhance performance in NFL players. And in my discussions with him, we thought, you know, why football? It’s interesting to know about that. But baseball would be even more interesting because there’s three levels of minor leagues that you have to get through before you get to the major leagues.

And then also, I saw that there was only an average of 2 to 3 years for a career in a major League Baseball player. So what I was trying to figure out is, okay, basically at the major league level, they’re all great athletically, but what is it that separates them apart from being able to have a long career in the major leagues?

Okay, I love this. I didn’t know that there was only 2 to 3 year average tenure for a baseball player. And Triston has been getting more and more into the Padres and baseball. And so tell me a little bit, what’s the difference between 2 to 3 years versus those folks who have a long, long career? I’m thinking of Yankees right now.

I’m an old Yankees fan like Mariano Rivera, plated to his forties. So tell us a little bit about what is the deep reference. So there is a term in sports psychology called mental toughness, and that is an all encompassing term. And the biggest thing in mental toughness is self-confidence, low self-confidence. If you can be confident, not just confident based off of how you play and how you perform, but confident from an internal level that’s going to help keep you around for a long time.

Because again, particularly in baseball, if you, you know, in terms of batting, if you strike out seven times, out of ten times and you only get a hit three out of ten times, you can still be in the major leagues. So and be in the baseball Hall of Fame. So it’s that importance of remaining confident in yourself and also being able to be resilient, be able to deal with failure, being motivated and having a good work ethic.

Lots of different things that I go through in the in the course and not just for baseball, it’s for entrepreneurs, it’s for course creators, right? So I’m thinking through I hear resilience being able to get through failure, work ethic. This is exactly what we need as course creators, right? Absolutely. And so I had started my practice off in sports psychology, but then I started getting business professionals from all different fields, calling me and asking me, Hey, I have to perform at a high level at my job, and I have a lot of pressure to do that.

Can you teach me what you teach your athletes? And so that’s how it got translated into working with business professionals. And so that’s kind of what I based the course off of is catering it towards business professionals. But I definitely did have you have to use a lot of the, you know, tools and skills that I teach in my course when creating this course for myself.

And then if I don’t have the resilience. Dr. Wagner, I can build that. You’re saying, is there something that has to be inside of us already or we can develop that with these skills with the course? Absolutely. They can be developed. It might take a little bit more work if it’s not in a already in year one, but absolutely these things can be learned.

Okay, that’s so great. I could talk about this for hours with you. I do want to get back to the course and this specific creation. What surprised you about working on the course? Um, it was a lot of work and the fly, but it was very exciting to do it. It’s not like I was sitting down to work on the scripts that that probably was the biggest thing was developing the, the scripts and it was a lot of work.

But at the same time, that also got me really excited about doing the course and made it even more passionate for me and more motivated for me to want to do it. Yeah. So what about the scripting was most difficult because I hear that again, again and again, and people who have been on the podcast has said that.

What do you think it was about getting that content done? Well, a couple of things. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t being too wordy and I was kind of getting to the point. I feel like people nowadays, their time is extremely limited and I wanted to just say what I had to say and get my point across quickly.

The other thing that I wanted to do is I wanted to make sure that the wording was correctly. So of course, in psychology we had certain terms that we used, but maybe not everybody is familiar with those terms. So I had to make sure that I was using words and putting it in ways in which everybody could understand.

Even if you don’t have a background in psychology. Yeah. And how do you think this course kind of is a companion with what you do with your one to ones? Is it a similar process or it’s kind of something different? It’s very similar. And so everybody presents to me with different concerns or different things. They want to work on different goals, but the lessons that I set and the topics that I discuss in this course are the ones that I see most frequently.

I would say the only difference is that working one on one in my practice there is a little bit more individualism because I can hear more from you about what the background is and kind of how you got to where you are and why you might be having challenges and the way in which you are. But still, the tools that I would teach someone in my private practice are the same tools that I’m teaching in this course.

And then also, of course, at the end I do offer one on ones people would like some more one on one work with me. Oh, that’s great. And one of the things I love about you also a Dr. Wagner is I know on your Instagram you talk about the issues that you go through as well, like negative self-talk.

So I feel like you’re a work in progress. Do you feel like you’re a work in progress and you use this content as well? Yes, absolutely. So I am always a work in progress. I am by no means perfect and never make mistakes. I am just like everybody else. And I sometimes have to be reminded that I need to be doing the things that I am teaching people.

So for example, in one of the videos on Instagram that I posted, I was just kind of saying, Hey, like, this is really hard for me because putting out this course and putting myself out there and my content and giving opportunity to people to judge me or criticize me, that was really hard because I’m always so hard on myself.

And to think about other people maybe being critical or judgmental of me too was very scary. So if you watched that video on my Instagram post, it goes through exactly what my process was and how I was able to overcome that. Yeah, and you talk about negative self-talk, right? And give us a couple of ways and solutions to work through that.

Like you want to give us one right now. This happened to me earlier in the week where something happened with Tristan and I had to think about tools to kind of counteract that just disempowering talk that we have inside ourselves. It really yeah, I mean, it could be anything from I think one of the things that I mentioned in the Instagram post is, well, why would anybody care?

Listen to what I have to say. Right? So I had to go through and say no, like I am an expert in this. I have the research, I have the clinical experience. I’ve had success with clients, I’ve had big success with clients. So I had to keep reminding myself that now what I have to say and what I want to teach to these people is very value.

That’s amazing. I always say that to my experts. You are the expert. You have transference, major. You have tremendous results. Dr. Wagner Right. So the fact that even you feel that way is meaningful, but you talk to yourself through it. I love it. Yeah. So self-talk, I’d say, well, positive self-talk specifically is probably the most important thing that a person could work on.

If you work on nothing else about yourself. Yeah, work on your self-talk and make sure that it’s positive. Okay, I love that. So what’s next? I know you’ve got this free guide. We’ll link to it in the show notes. What’s the plan for the course? What’s the plan for you? Yeah, yeah. So right now we’re just working on marketing the course and getting it out there and building my brand on.

I definitely am open to doing other courses and I would love to hear from people and get some feedback from people on what specifically they might find helpful or what they would like to see a future course in. And then also, as I mentioned earlier, doing the one on one people who would like to follow up with me on an individual basis after completing the online course.

Amazing. All link to all those resources in the show notes. And thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule. You’re a mom full time practice I beer playing pickleball. You’ve got all the things happening. So thank you for coming by. Yes. Thank you, Gina, so much for having me. All right. What did you think about Dr. Wagner?

I love when she’s talking about mental toughness that we need and we need to fight that negative self-talk. When I was working for performance coach Tony Robbins, I learned a technique to kind of dig in to the negative thoughts and say, What’s the worst that could happen? And just keep asking, okay, so if that came to fruition, then what?

And then if that happened, then what? And usually by the time I asked two or three of those, I realized that I’m being silly, that my brain is going places that are just ridiculous and I’ve calmed down. So that’s how I paddle self-talk or when I’m feeling a little bit of imposter syndrome. I want you to listen to Dr. Wagner’s advice so we can all be at the top of our game.

She outlined some of this criteria in her free guide. I’ll link to it in the show notes so you can check out those principles. All right. Next week I’ll be back with another workshop episode. Until then, make sure you subscribe, Go create, be you and be brilliant and get it done.