Jeffrey Wildfogel wants everyone to have a peak experience
by Diane Sussman
Part of Jeffrey Wildfogel's work is weaning athletes from their talismans and amulets. "Sports players tend to be very superstitious," he said. And Wildfogel has encountered them all.
The football player who couldn't play without his lucky shirt. The basketball player who had to dribble the ball three times before putting it into play. The baseball player who ritually rubbed his teammates' heads before a game. Or the football player who had a particular, inviolable order for getting dressed before a game.
Others simply freeze. Like the golfer who couldn't choose an iron. Or the catcher who wouldn't throw the ball back to the pitcher. "This is an actual phenomenon," said Wildfogel. "It only happens when the catcher has lots of time."??
Paralysis or lucky charms, Wildfogel points his finger at two C's: confidence and concentration.
Confidence and concentration, confidence and concentration--the words repeat in his sentences like a personal mantra. They are his soapbox, obsession and bread and butter.
A graduate of Stanford University with a doctorate in psychology, Wildfogel runs the Mental Edge, a Mountain View psychological consulting firm that specializes in helping people become "peak performers."
He is best known as the ebullient teacher of a class in "The Psychology of Peak Performance," offered through the Stanford University Continuing Studies department.
Only a handful of classes in the Stanford evening program draw as many students: Patricia Ryan's improvisational acting class, Introduction to Opera, the occasional class on leadership abilities and anything taught by classics professor emeritus Tony Raubitschek.
The 10-week class teaches the same principles Wildfogel found effective for elite athletes, tailored to meet the needs of Everyman--not to mention Everywoman and Everybusiness.
When Wildfogel started the Mental Edge five years ago, the bulk of his clients were elite athletes and sports teams seeking to sharpen their competitive edge. Now his business is primarily business people eager to profit, in every way, from the psychological principles that work for athletes. Apple Computer, Silicon Graphics Inc., Rolm Systems Inc. and Tandem Computers all have sought Wildfogel's services.
The insights don't come cheap. Tuitition for the Stanford class costs $250, a five-week group workshop costs $195 to $295, and individual coaching ranges from $150 to $175 an hour.
Certainly, the past decade has generated a huge interest--witness the emergent field of sports psychology--in the concept of mind over muscle. It is now accepted wisdom in athletic circles that an athlete's mental state can doom or enhance a performance.
Indeed, at the highest levels of competition, the physical differences between athletes are so minuscule that psychological factors give the edge. "As you go further in any endeavor, the mental game becomes more important because the talent starts to even out," said Wildfogel. "People who weren't as good got out."
Two-time Olympic runner and Menlo Park resident PattiSue Plumer knows only too well how easy it is to get psychologically derailed--even in the good times. "I had a lot of pressure, being the favorite, wanting to do my best," she said. "It's hard.
"Sometimes I think we are our own worst enemies," she continued. "We do a lot of things to sabotage our own success."
When a back injury sidelined Plumer the year before the Olympic games, she knew she needed more than just cold compresses and rest. "I needed to get back to a place when I was running well and felt good," she said. "I had this injured nerve and my approach was to pretend like it didn't matter."
She turned to sports psychologists, among them Wildfogel. Together they developed strategies that would keep her mentally fit. "I did a lot of visualizations and tried to figure out how the race would unfold," she said. "But it was good in other ways. The strategies I learned I can apply across the board."
It was statements like these that led to what Wildfogel calls "the insight."
"I realized that the same principles that worked for athletes could work for business people, or people who just felt they weren't achieving at their peak," he said.
It was but a short leap from insight to setting up a business. "All of a sudden, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to help people reach their peak performance."
The Mental Edge had arrived.
Wildfogel even invented a title for himself that doesn't typecast him as a sports psychologist. "I'm an achievement coach," he said, "not a psychologist."
But insight, a name and an office do not a full Rolodex of clients make. In fact, changing the direction of his business plunged Wildfogel into a crisis of--yes, that's right--confidence.
The usual sorts of new-business-related questions plagued him. If, as one pop psychology book promises, you do what you love, will money really follow? How long, exactly, does it take for money to follow? And, if money doesn't follow, then what?
"When I started the Mental Edge it was the scariest time of my life and also the calmest," said Wildfogel. "I felt I spent my whole life preparing for this work. But I also felt, because it was my purpose, I couldn't fail."
In the years preceding, he had been more or less drifting, teaching for a while at Baruch College, but without his full spirit. He came back to Stanford "without a clear idea" of what he was going to do. Mostly, he mulled. "I had some notion I wanted to do achievement coaching," he said. "I mostly would sit in the house and fantasize about what I wanted to do."
To hear him tell it, he has been examining the strategies that distinguish winners from losers since the days when he spent all his time playing slapball in his Queens neighborhood.
As a sports enthusiast without a Schwarzenegger build, Wildfogel learned early on that outwitting his opponents was his only salvation. "Face it, I wasn't as physically talented," he said. "But if I could outsmart them, I could win."
Over the years, the lessons of childhood became the foundation for many of the beliefs that drive his practice. "I had enthusiasm and I had confidence. I never believed until that last moment that we wouldn't win."
Raised in an "upper-lower-class" family, he and his brother were the first in the family to go to college. "To say we were middle class would be putting on airs." His father was a paper cutter, his mother a homemaker.
He approached education the same way he approached sports: full speed ahead. "Even when I was 5, I knew I was going to get as much education as I could get. I didn't know what college was, but I knew I was going to college."
He attended City College of New York--"it was free"--where he took a psychology class by accident. It was then that he became interested in the factors that affect performance.
He began to refine his ideas while getting his doctorate at Stanford. He became fascinated with understanding why a well-trained, elite athlete would choke or fail.
For his dissertation, he designed an experiment that rewarded participants with varying amounts of money for performing well at a bean bag toss. "It was a clever little study," said Albert Hastorf, psychology professor emeritus at Stanford. "He had all these people throwing bean bags, he found some interesting things."
What he found was that performances varied according to levels of concentration. And that concentration, more than either training or the desire to win, determined success.
"There is solid research behind what I do," said Wildfogel, responding rhetorically to an often-heard criticism that what he does is "airy-fairy." "It's not just airy-fairy, snake-oil stuff."
At times, however, it can sound like it, particularly when Wildfogel tries to explain the nuts and bolts of what he is trying to achieve. "I want to give people the courage to commit to their commitments, to connect with their passion," he said. "If you connect with your purpose, mission and values, you will succeed."
If his Stanford class is any indication, clients lap up connecting with their purpose and committing to their commitments.
"There are times when we all need a catalyst. He is a catalytic person," said one student.
A more pragmatic student put it this way: "It's cheaper than therapy, and a whole lot shorter."
"The Wildfogel phenomenon," mused Palo Alto landscape architect and former student, Peter Lockhart. "What is it? Contagious enthusiasm."
It's true. In the three hours of class, Wildfogel talks practically non-stop, gesticulating like a conductor, juggling oranges, getting chalk all over himself and smiling--always smiling.
He structures his class like little else in academia. There are no tests or research papers. Instead, students do "mental maps," write "insight papers" and talk. "This is not a normal class. The idea is for people to invent their own way of living to become a peak performer."
What if their way of inventing their own way of living involves a late insight paper? "They can take three months or three years. Of course, if they take three years, they have to think about why it takes three years."
What about excuses? "People say, 'I made 28 excuses and you won't let me say them.'"
Not even the one about the dog that ate the insight paper? "The dog is gone. Now the dog is a computer."
And people learn from this?
As an end-of-term exercise, students have a chance to decide that for themselves. On the last day, Wildfogel asks each student to talk about any changes in their lives during the past 10 weeks.
It was a confessional of desires. A psychotherapist wanted to learn to take her own health as seriously as she takes her clients' psychological health. A stockbroker came because he wanted "balance."
"I'm given to excess," he said. "I want to be delivering all the time as a husband, father, broker and manager."
And, yes, in their own minds, people progressed. A busy working mother learned to say no. "Before this class, I don't think I used that word."
A local businessman started smiling at work and walking more briskly (a Wildfogelism called "whistling while you work").
"And you know, it works," he said.
Yet no one really knows what happens to these people months, even years, down the road.
Do they go on to a better golf game, a faster swim time, a more pacific home life? Or do they find their way to a 12-step program and a psychotherapist? "Whether it's reality or illusion, I don't know," said Lockhart. "People get pretty cranked up to begin with. I suppose some stay cranked up."
And isn't there always the concern that if Wildfogel does his job too well, in other words, if people all over America suddenly started to concentrate and became confident, he will have talked his way out of a job? "People think peak performance is like a mountaintop: When you get to the top, you are there," said Wildfogel. "I think of it as a staircase. There's always another peak. I want to help them get to that next peak."
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