Richard Graves (00:01.442)
Well Nick, it's fantastic to have you join me on this week's Science for Sport podcast. First of all, from Las Vegas, Nevada, welcome along to the show.

Nick Holton (00:09.058)
Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here with you.

Richard Graves (00:12.642)
Now before we get into the topic of anti-fragility for our listeners on the podcast, viewers on our YouTube channel Science for Sport, just tell us a little bit about yourself, introduce yourself and your back.

Nick Holton (00:25.016)
Sure, sure. So the the kind of medium version is at a pretty young age I realized I got a lot of satisfaction and enjoyment out of helping people level up. Let's let's put it sort of generally. And so that brought me into the world of education in the United States and

That taught me a lot, but was also a bit frustrating because I I thought in many ways it limited potential as often as it nourished it. And so I ended up going back for a couple different advanced degrees in education and psychology. And it was during my doctoral program that I stumbled on to a couple different terms and a couple of different fields that really opened up, I think, the science of human potential, which I I think this the show is devoted to, albeit in the sports format. But this sort of science really

Tends to transcend fields and communities and performance settings. So as I moved through my doctoral program and got introduced to human flourishing, positive psychology, the flow state, intrinsic motivation, things like that, I finally started getting language to what I would have described as kind of the anek data, the observational experiences that I was seeing in a classroom.

And I should also mention I was a 15-year club soccer coach and a player myself. So I was seeing these things on the field across age groups really didn't matter, right? And so coming out of that doctoral program, I really was devoted to helping different entities, typically high pressure entities, which we'll get into schools, first responders, businesses, and certainly, of course, athletes.

try to learn some of this science and start to apply it to their lives. And so that brought me into the world of coaching, consulting. We now do a lot of performance consulting, like I said, across different fields and have been doing that for the last 10 to 15 years.

Richard Graves (02:23.958)
And you've spent a lot of time looking into this, researching it, you've written papers on antifragility, so when we use this term, just give us an idea of what we're referring to and what we're talking about.

Nick Holton (02:28.118)
Yeah.

Nick Holton (02:34.187)
Yeah. So the quick bit of context, in twenty twenty two, here in the States, unfortunately in the month of March, there were five

five suicides among NCAA athletes just in that month alone. And the reason I focus on that month and that year is that was the experience that really sort of triggered the start of our our company now, the Anti-Fragile Academy. The co-founder and I, Dr. Adam Wright, who does mental or did mental performance for the Washington Nationals here in the United States, we were kind of looking around at the field and saying there's clearly

A rising need for what we generally saw as let's call it mental health services.

Or well-being services, like just managing the difficulty of high-pressure scenarios. But we also felt like a lot of those services were reactionary. Adam would call them a break fix model. really just wait till something's wrong and then maybe go see a CMPC or a psychologist or a counselor or whatever else it might be. And that is massively valuable, right, in all sorts of ways. And

We wanted to think hard about how to try to get out in front of some of these things in a more proactive way. And so Adam and I come from slightly different scientific traditions, but there's a lot of overlap. And so through some of the research, through some of our conversation and dialogue and working with colleagues and just, you know, pressure testing some of these things, we kept coming back to this notion of anti fragility from Nicholas Nassim Taleb's 2012 book, Anti Fragile.

Nick Holton (04:15.817)
And so the simple distinction here, and we'll get into this in more detail, I'm sure, but the simple distinction is between anti-fragility and resilience. And in resilience, you can hear the distinction in the first part of the word, the R-E. It is a rebound, it is a bounce back, right? That is inherently reactionary, right? Most of the time. Most of the time.

The other really important distinction, and Taleb argued for this in his original book, which had no psychology in it, right? Taleb's notion of antifragile was really about just dealing with highly volatile, complex, ambiguous environments. We took that term and said, okay, resilience is missing something. It's talking about bouncing back, and it's talking about a return to baseline, in most cases, right? A return to baseline. Antifragile

Or to be anti-fragile is to be proactive, leaning into unpleasantness or distress. It's a totally different orientation to those experiences. And when some of those things are unchosen, elements of them are unchosen, an anti-fragile person still finds ways to grow from them, not necessarily just return to baseline and make everything the same again. Right? So proactive.

Richard Graves (05:36.421)
I'm glad you've highlighted these distinctions because reading some of your literature, just to re-emphasise, because I think it's important we do so, you did put robustness withstands loads, resilience returns to baseline, whereas anti-fragility means actually gaining capacity because of well-dosed load. Why does it matter to make such a distinction?

Nick Holton (05:37.975)
Growth oriented, sorry.

Nick Holton (06:00.363)
Between anti-fragility and resilience? Because I think well, so let's talk about in the context of sport, right? would you rather have an athlete who has spent most of their training waiting for and then randomly responding to difficult moments? Or would you rather have the athlete who's trained them in advance and prepared themselves for it? So we could take a simple example like visualization, right? Which I'm sure a lot of your listeners will

Think about practice, know, use, all those sorts of things. And so sorry for focusing this on on an American story, but some of your listeners may remember the American gymnastics team in the last summer Olympics. Very, very famous video among sports psych nerds like us of the Palma horse athlete. I I'm sorry, I can't remember his name, but I can see his face, glasses, the whole thing. And he had to spend, I think, the final day of the team competition waiting out.

hours and hours and hours to do his one event, which was the Palmel Horse. And the video that went viral, I'm sure you remember, was him with his eyes closed, time after time after time, just kind of working through his routine. And so we know this is visualization. Well, a lot of times what athletes and coaches do with visualization is they just focus on succeeding. Right? I will do this perfectly.

Things will go perfectly. I will have ideal circumstances. I'll feel good about myself after. And that's a great approach in many cases because it might boost confidence, right? And bring a different sort of attitude, mindset, and player into that situation. But it's also really fragile. Because what happens when it's not ideal circumstances? What happens when you're not in a flow state? You need a clutch state, which are different things. What happens when you're nursing an injury? What happens when you had a crap night of sleep?

The day before, right? the athlete or any sort of high-pressure performer, we would argue that proactively leans into those visualizations, practices those settings in advance. This is not rocket science. They're going to have some adaptation to that, and we would argue then be better prepared for those scenarios when they if they eventually do come.

Richard Graves (08:14.628)
So in that instance you talk about then how important is having a good comfort level, feeling secure in order to take on adversity if you like, to be in this context and anti-fragile. Do we see that be more so in an athlete that is secure in their own surroundings, has trust in their coach and staff around them than one that doesn't?

Nick Holton (08:38.093)
It's a great question and we are doing the investigating to try to find that out, right? Because as soon as you bring up that very, very good question, then it breaks down to okay, well, how are we going to measure this and talk about this and what sort of associations can we actually create? And so immediately when you mention surroundings, my head goes to one of the most venerable well being researchers in the world, Carol Riff out of the University of Wisconsin.

She popularized with a model called psychological well-being, has six different subcomponents, and one of them is called environmental mastery. And this basically means our environment is predictable. It's somewhat consistent. We can walk into it with some confidence, feeling like we can navigate it, right? Okay, that's amazing. Then we've got Shigehiroishi at the University of Chicago that says, Well, psychological well-being is interesting.

But he's also arguing for what he would call a rich life, a different type of well-being or happiness that is based on change, that is based on perspective shifts. richness sounds very different than just well-being or unbridled positivity, right? And so when you think about it something like surroundings, well, what is going to build anti-fragility? Secure surroundings?

Completely chaotic surroundings, or something probably in between that is appropriately dosed for that unique individual, their unique mindsets, resilience, mental capacity, physical capacity, right? And trying to then dose it and apply it appropriately for those specific contexts, right? And in education, we would call it differentiation. You're trying to meet them on the individual level.

Richard Graves (10:24.752)
And automatically, just from that one answer Nick, that throws up a whole range of questions. When you talk about having the correct dose, what is the correct dose? How do we measure it? Well, this is the thing, isn't it? How do we measure antifragility? Because people will say if you can't measure it, it's not a real phenomenon. Is it just a metaphor? How do you respond to all

Nick Holton (10:34.497)
Don't know yet. Yeah, don't know yet. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Nick Holton (10:46.679)
So there's currently two or three different measures that exist for anti-fragility. Now, like anything in science, we probably overdo the amount of types and measures and and complicate it a bit. But these particular measures are primarily focused in the workplace setting. And I would argue, well I'm I'm so happy they exist and they've really moved the idea forward, they're s they're still quite incomplete as a result. And so what we're doing, myself and a small team of authors, is trying to

Take some of those measures, take the research on resilience, take the research on anti-fragility, and start to break down some of these factors or subcomponents, or this constellation of personality traits, and behaviors that make someone anti-fragile. So far, on a theoretical level, we can try to break it down into three somewhat simple subfactors. So if we go back to sort of the conceptualization, it's proactive, right? And it's about growth.

Then these three subcomponents should reflect that. So the first one is really stress or distress, openness, right? Or seeking, even. It is a proactive personality to use Brendan Markey Towler's term. They're actually looking for some of that unpleasantness for the growth of it, right? it is what we call anti-fragile mindsets. So

A lot of the listeners are probably familiar with Aliyah Crumb's work on mindset, the difference between a challenge and a threat mindset. That's a perfect example, right, of what we might call an anti-fragile mindset. It's somebody who is actually embracing the unpleasantness, looking for it, leaning into it. And then as a consequence, it's simple math, they get more practice. Now, once they've embraced it and leaned into it, well, then you still need resilience because you're in the midst of it.

Right, you still need to be able to respond to the actual unpleasantness in that moment. And so the second component we call stress navigation. You could loosely refer to other resilient skills, but this is psychological flexibility, this is mindfulness or attention and awareness, right? It's it's emotional awareness and emotional intelligence, all the core skills that help us work through something really uncomfortable. So then what's the third part?

Nick Holton (13:09.195)
I've leaned into this, I've navigated it. To be anti-fragile, I need to consolidate and grow from it. And so the third subfactor is stress benefit. How, if at all, have I or my life measuredly improved as a result of this experience in anti-fragility? And so that's where we're starting. And of course, there's a lot of subcomponents underneath that that we're building off of good psychrometric tests. but we're probably a good still six months away from publishing that.

Richard Graves (13:38.661)
And this is good because the whole point of this is challenging this theory and getting answers from experts like yourself. So to put it into a sporting context, in the Premier League, for example, in years gone by, coaches, players would argue that what we saw in Fergie time with Manchester United, where they'd find a way to get a late equaliser, late winner, that was resilience born out of a team ethos, belief, experience.

Nick Holton (13:42.795)
Yeah.

Richard Graves (14:05.62)
never say die attitude in the NFL. It might be Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs, Tom Brady with the New England Patriots finding a way to engineer that final drive, game-winning drive of the game and get over the line. That's a sporting context. The one concern when we talk about anti-fragility is if we're discussing the idea of a stress load in order to learn and grow from it, is there a world whereby you get it wrong?

You put too much stress on an athlete or a group of individuals and you actually make them worse for that experience.

Nick Holton (14:42.763)
Yeah, we're doing it right now. All over the place. All the clubs. All over the place, at least in the United States, Academy, ECN I'm talking soccer terms here, right? And I don't know how it is in the UK. But I would argue, and this is part of the reason the companies came together and we started them, is pressure has never been higher, appropriately or inappropriately, for young people in a an environment that is generally supposed to just be about fun.

Enjoy, right? And and I'm guilty of that too when I was coaching, put a lot of meaning into it. You really want to do these great things for the kids. A lot of times the kids have these big goals. You want to try to help them accomplish those things. But it's really, really to lose sight of that N of one, right? Is this kid in a place where they can really handle leveling up these different challenges along the way? And then and you ask a, I think, a really tricky question too.

Is a parent and or coach equipped to do the dosing and to help them with the recovery and to help them with the processing from the dosing. Right? There's a big, big difference between, hey, here's a pool. Now you know how to tread water and swim, right? And if you don't, I can jump in after you, versus here's an ocean, you don't know how to swim, and I can see a shark.

Right. And so we want to make sure we have the the proper context, but ideally the proper people there to support that as well. And that's been some of the challenges. Scaling that is really difficult given some of the factors involved.

Richard Graves (16:08.504)
Absolutely.

Richard Graves (16:21.388)
If you can't measure anti-fragility right now, how do we know then what a well-dosed, stressed athlete looks like and, more importantly, how do know that you've got the balance right?

Nick Holton (16:34.475)
Yeah. So that's what we're working on. just be f to be clear, we can measure anti fragility in a couple different ways. I don't love those ways, right? So we're trying to do a better way.

Richard Graves (16:46.224)
Are we engineers are looking to get to a point where you have an anti-fragility score, for example, that gives coaches, sports scientists something that's tangible that you can measure it by?

Nick Holton (16:59.943)
Yes, y yes, and I would want that score to be similar to something for those that wear wearables to an HRV, right? So an HRV has a score, but it's never supposed to be compared to other people's HRVs. It's a score relative to your own. That's what I would want to see out of anti fragility, right? Is some sort of standardization so that we can see whether people are growing in those areas or not relative to their own baseline.

Not necessarily a comparative piece. And so we've already started to try to do this a bit. The other company that I run is called MyEdge, and we have a mobile platform that is trying to synthesize these things with good academic measures that have been edited and altered, bringing them together in a way that creates not just scores.

But patterns from these pillars. And I can I can tell you what those patterns look like because they speak to your question directly. But then it feeds it all into an AI coach so that there is more accessibility, more predictability, more science behind how a player may be able to respond to that. Then they also have the ability to book in with me for a one on one human coaching session if they need to, right? So we're trying Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Graves (18:09.974)
Yeah, absolutely. Do explain to our audience what those patterns look like, because I would assume, and correct me if I'm wrong, when it comes to anti-fragility, you'll coach a collegiate athlete or give consultation to a collegiate program, which is what the MyEdge platform does, in very different fashions to how you would approach an elite athlete, for example.

Nick Holton (18:34.733)
explain that second part. How

Richard Graves (18:38.66)
I would imagine that if you're dealing with an elite athlete, already have a little bit more experience, probably encountered a little bit more adversity, a worldly wise if you like, and therefore I'd imagine you can approach it a little bit differently to a young athlete who's still learning their trade is a little bit naive.

Nick Holton (18:58.259)
I see. I see. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Thank you for that. So to be to that's a good qualification. We don't start people on my edge until fourteen or older. Right. And then even then we're focusing primarily on collegiate or amate high level amateur where there's less fewer resources, right? And less access. but you're a hundred percent right. And so the way Well, let's start with the six pillars and the patterns. Okay. So so we've made the argument.

That there are six core elements that are gonna help any performer, but especially an athlete, more consistently hit their peak performance and highest potentials. Obviously, you know one of them's gonna be anti-fragility. We also include resilience, different measures based on different things with a little bit of overlap around awareness and attention. We then include well-being. Okay, we're not interested in athletes that are quote unquote successful but burn themselves out.

This is and and then connected to that is the fourth pillar, which is sustainability. Sustainability is just an inverted burnout score. So the well-being and the burnout is okay, it's great if you're performing, it's great if you're anti-fragile, it's great if you're resilient, but none of that matters if your body just shuts down because you've overdone it. Right. So we need to pay attention to the well-being piece, we need to pay attention to the burnout piece.

Then we've got performance or mental performance. So that's primarily around flow state accessibility and likelihood and consistency. And then the sixth, which which we really enjoy, is an integration with your biofeedback device so that it pulls three or four different metrics to show deviations from baseline and give us what we call a load or stress score.

So we're simultaneously trying to pull in some biofeedback and qualitative data to assess the load level, pair that through our math and kind of back end algorithms to then integrate it with the other five pillars and say, okay, what's your pattern? So what are the patterns? It goes basically from the full range of totally burned out to growing, being challenged and thriving.

Nick Holton (21:12.279)
Right. But the the categories in between are a little more nuanced. There's a category there's a lot going on. Yep. And so you could be, for instance, we we have a category called thriving despite load. You're crushing it. You're doing great, but it's a house of cards. Right? Like one thing happens and your systems, your routines, your performance are just gonna fall apart because you are probably just teetering right over that edge.

Richard Graves (21:16.26)
I was going to say there's a lot going on in between those two extremes.

Nick Holton (21:40.994)
We have another category that's called underutilized capacity. You're not pushing hard enough. Like you're a collegiate athlete. Why aren't you doing these things? Why aren't you you know, and there's could be a variety of reasons, but it's everything in between. Are you burned out? Are you right where you we want you and you wanna be? Are you doing well, but you're really risking it, right? Are you underutilized? Are you just kind of neutral somewhere in between?

And the hardest part for any performer is constantly knowing or assessing some of those things day to day. So the check-ins, the scores, the patterns, it tries to make it easier for them. But then we also have a a coaches portal so coaches can see team level patterns without betraying individual anonymity and confidence. This is something we've heard from coaches a lot too. Like I'm I'm not an amateur psychologist. I don't know how to respond to these things. I often don't know how my teams are doing.

So we're trying to give them more insight without breaking down privacy for these athletes.

Richard Graves (22:40.792)
We have a lot of coaches that listen from all levels, amateur up to pro sports level, elite level. And I imagine just that one answer you've given us alone, there's a lot of nodding heads listening to this relating to what you're saying. However, the concept itself, anti-fagility, may be completely new to them. If that's the case, they're listening to this and thinking, I know there's something I need to take to this and employ with the individuals I use. What would be the one thing that you'd start them off with tomorrow?

Nick Holton (22:52.011)
Yeah.

Nick Holton (23:12.631)
So that's a great question. Can I can I give you two? Is that okay? Can I cheat? Yeah, okay, great. so the one thing I would start off with is what type of unpleasantness are you trying to train your athletes for? the reason I say that is almost every time I sit down with an athlete and they're dealing with something unpleasant, you know what they call it. They just call it stress.

Richard Graves (23:16.494)
Absolutely.

Nick Holton (23:40.59)
Okay. Okay. Well, stress is about pressure. Frustration is about control. Disappointments about expectations. Anger is about injustice. Right? Those are all extremely different emotions and they require different responses. So if you have, I'm thinking of a you got a player with anger management, right? Like they just flip out. They just kind of lose their mind if they they s hit one off the crossbar, they get tackled fairly or unfairly.

Right. So if I want to train that player at actually growing and getting better from those moments, Michael Jordan, who will make up insults, right, to get themselves into a flow state, then I need to put her in situations that's gonna trigger her anger a little bit. Safely, thoughtfully, with her agreement in place to practice it, right? Not surprising her you know, for something that she didn't agree to if they're

adolescent or youth, you've got to talk to the parents as well, right? But the first question is, what are we trying to help them learn to accept and grow from? Right? Then you can break it down to number two is what is the let's call it safest challenge to current skill level ratio or gap that I can put in front of them that will replicate as close as we can get to.

The situations she's having trouble with. Right? And that's the way it works with just about any sort of learning or growth. There's scaffolding to it. And sure, in many cases, if you miss that scaffolding, if you jump too far and you fail, a lot of situations that's not a problem. In fact, and sometimes we encourage people to miss long so you know where the line is, but not when it comes to unpleasantness or potential trauma in some cases.

This isn't trauma glorification. This isn't saying do hard things for the sake of hard things. This is talking about the very clear scientific utility that human beings get from properly dosed, recoverable, unpleasant experiences.

Richard Graves (25:51.044)
And again, it's important, as with many aspects of sports science, context is key to all of this and that comes through loud and clear. From what you're saying, that comes through loud and clear. Before we wrap this up, I just want to refer to a scope review that you were part of earlier this year and you finish up in it with almost the final paragraph saying, despite its promise, the field of anti-fragility remains in its infancy.

Nick Holton (26:00.11)
It's everything.

Richard Graves (26:19.928)
with significant limitations in conceptual clarity, measurement and empirical investigation. Future research must prioritise the development of robust tools and frameworks to better define and operationalise antifragility, ensuring its applicability across diverse contexts and populations." In that context of what's been written there, where do we move forward with this and how does it progress over the next three, four, five years?

Nick Holton (26:46.689)
I think it's measurement. I think we've got to get better at it in a couple of different ways. And not to get too into the weeds here, but in most psychological measurements you have some limitations 'cause there's surveys, there's self report, and then you have to start to break down a concept like anti fragility or resilience. I are those traits? Is that a psychobiological state? Right? And that's a complicated thing, but I'm gonna give a shout out to somebody who's investigating the state question right now.

Dr. Marcello Bigliassi in his lab. The simplest way to say it is that he is essentially studying resilience and antifragility on a neurochemical, biological level with wild, amazing equipment that I can't explain, right? but really, really incredible stuff. And he's starting to show associations between those states and say performance or well-being outcomes. That's more on the biological or psychobiological side.

We're gonna try to complement on more the purely psychological side with some of these measures that I've laid out for you and that we're starting to put in place.

Richard Graves (27:55.076)
plenty to look forward to going forward than it sounds like.

Nick Holton (27:58.23)
I hope so, right? It's you know, it's science, so we're not moving forward as if this is a foregone conclusion, but there's certainly plenty of good theory behind it, a lot of early evidence. And at some point I'm still waiting for the conversation where I talk about this and somebody says, Well, that doesn't make any sense. There's no way that, you know, exists. And so we don't want to go in trying to confirm these own our own biases. and at the same time, it looks like there's something there. We're gonna try to see if we can concretize it.

And not only measure it, but make it measurable in a way that makes it usable by people, have some utility to it.

Richard Graves (28:35.33)
Well, I have no doubt you've given our listeners plenty of food for thought and no doubt many of them have questions. If so, where can they stay across the work you're doing and the very latest developments on social media?

Nick Holton (28:47.073)
Sure. Well, I you know, I'm on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to connect with anyone there, you know, on the on the professional piece. But if you're looking for stuff on anti-fragility, our company is called the AntifragileAcademy.com. That's one word, no hyphen. we do all sorts of services from coaching to workshops to keynotes, curriculum in some cases, if you're looking to build out your own program. but if you're if you're a sports coach or a parent or an athletic director, some sort of director of of that type.

check out my edge, my edge dot org, and that's the platform that's specifically focused on athletes ages fourteen to twenty three. You can get lots more information and get in touch with us there.

Richard Graves (29:26.998)
and I'm sure we'll have plenty of our audience that do take you up on that offer. Listen, Nick Holton, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. It's been a fascinating conversation and I look forward to seeing what lies ahead in the future.

Nick Holton (29:38.029)
Well, thanks so much again for having me, Richard. Really, really enjoyed it. love the show and appreciate all the the work you're doing and putting this sort of stuff out there for us.