Our Why
“That’s why you can trust me — cause I’ve been there. I’ve walked in those shoes, felt that pressure, lived that life. Whatever you’re feeling, I’ve felt it too.”
The first time the Seattle Seahawks trainer told me, “Chris, you’re gonna go talk to someone” — someone as in a mental health professional — my answer was short and to the point.
Hell, no.
It was my fifth year in the NFL, starting center with the Seahawks, and I kept getting a bunch of stingers. For whatever reason, I could not stay healthy. Mentally, it was wearing on me. I was done, and it was obvious. You could see on my face that I was exhausted and fed up.
That’s when our trainer suggested talking to a sport psychologist.
Now, I’m an athlete, but that doesn’t make me an idiot (despite what some people in our country think). I’m a Mississippi boy, where we believe in pulling up your bootstraps, getting to work and figuring it out on your own. We do not talk to other people about our feelings. I saw right through the trainer’s suggestion, and wasn’t going to fall for it.
So often in sports, especially at the highest level, the mental aspect of the game can be manipulated. Coaches tell us athletes to “go over there, talk to that guy or girl, get honest with them, tell them your deepest fears and weaknesses,” etc. And then it’s used against us. At least, that’s what it feels like.
So often in sports, especially at the highest level, the mental aspect of the game can be manipulated. Coaches tell us athletes to “go over there, talk to that guy or girl, get honest with them, tell them your deepest fears and weaknesses,” etc. And then it’s used against us. At least, that’s what it feels like.
Shortly after I retired in 2014, I got curious about personality types. I was shocked to hear, as I was getting ready to play my last game, that for the majority of guys, getting divorced and going broke happens pretty shortly after they leave the league. I wondered why that happened, and I knew the solution was more than having a good accountant on speed dial.
Most high-level athletes have, at one point or another, been asked to take a personality test. Coaches — and leaders in general — want to better understand their athletes and employees, and they often (incorrectly) think only a pen and paper test will achieve that. But what I know as a former athlete, and a dyslexic one at that, is that pen and paper tests make a lot of people anxious, consciously or subconsciously. We worry about how we’ll be judged. And testing bias is a real thing. There’s no question that there is value to pen and paper tests. But it can’t be all we rely on.
At the same time, I know coaches and leaders want to build better performing teams. I want to help them do that.
That’s how Mental Metrix was born. In 2018, I had an idea: what if you took personality, psychology, and language and — using science-backed data collection practices — combined them, and used that to really understand who people are, and what they’re motivated by.
What I hear from coaches all over the country these days is that they don’t know their athletes or how to motivate them. For example, kids walk in rooms with their heads down, no eye contact, thanks to a generation of players who have been raised on cell phones. They don’t know how to connect human-to-human — I have a teenager, so I’ve witnessed this first-hand — which means coaches are struggling to build relationships and get guys to trust them. And trust, we know, is a key ingredient to success.
Why would these kids open up anyway? As athletes, we’re taught that vulnerability of any sort is weakness. And weakness doesn’t equal winning. I understand why athletes are hesitant to share what’s really going on inside their heads.
But what I also understand at 41 years old, is that the most successful people, in any field, are successful because they know themselves — and getting to know yourself means you have to first get vulnerable.
But why do we always wait to hit rock bottom before we’re willing to get vulnerable? If we approached performance from a proactive foundation instead of a reactive one, the results would come quicker. Isn’t that what we all want – to pile up wins sooner rather than later?
And if we can create a space where the psychology aspect is used for athletes instead of against them, we can get buy-in, and ultimately set them up to be successful on the field, on the court and afterward, when they’re done playing.
I want to be clear that I am not a sport psychologist myself, or a mental health professional of any sort. I’ve gone to the experts and hired that out. What I am is someone who's been in the trenches, who understands an athlete’s motivation and an athlete’s fear of failure.
That’s why you can trust me — cause I’ve been there. I’ve walked in those shoes, felt that pressure, lived that life. Whatever you’re feeling, I’ve felt it too.
Now, I’ll be honest: I did go talk to that sport psychologist and she changed my life. I played five more years after I talked to her. She helped me understand myself, which reframed my entire perspective, and it made me a better professional athlete. My willingness to be vulnerable changed the trajectory of my career.
But I was in my late 20s and could see the big picture; I had the perspective and life experience to understand this was something I should at least try. College kids don’t always have that foresight – because they’re kids.
So at the college level, where young athletes are learning to be adults, this needs to be facilitated by coaches. Coaches need to understand how to really talk to their players. It’s not fair to say to an athlete, “I can’t deal with you, go talk to that person over there.” We need to shift the dynamic throughout the sports world, and it needs to be top-down. Coaches need to facilitate these conversations with their teams, and athletic directors need to facilitate them with their staff.
We are in an Information Age, and everyone, regardless of their age or experience level, is hungry for data that can help them get even incrementally better, and find success.
That’s exactly what Mental Metrix is — data, distilled in a way that’s accessible to athletes and coaches.
Simply put, it’s a game changer. And I’m going to help you use it.
