Feed the Rat

Special Announcement:

I’m hosting a free, 60-minute live webinar on Wednesday, January 14th at 4:00 PM (Mountain Standard Time)!

The theme will be focused on “Mastering the Mental Game and How to Remove the Biggest Barriers to Performance Excellence.”

Whether you’re coaching athletes, performers, or leaders, you’ve likely seen people who know what to do, but struggle to do it consistently under pressure. During this session, we’ll discuss practical ways to reduce mental interference, help people trust their preparation, and perform more freely.

If you have any interest in attending (or know someone who might be interested), you’re welcome to complete and submit the following registration link to confirm your spot (Registration Link).

For those that can attend live, we’ll carve out time during the session for Q&A where I can directly answer any of your biggest questions right on the spot. For those that can’t attend live, the session will be recorded and distributed via email to everyone that signed up.

Once you complete the registration, you’ll be added to the distribution list and I’ll send follow-up details and reminders (including the Zoom link) as we get closer to January 14th.

Today’s Theme:

Have you ever wanted to do something you knew would push you far outside your comfort zone just to see if you could accomplish it? Or maybe you’ve felt an inner desire to step into a new challenge that you knew would test every fiber of your being?

That instinct is common among elite performers. A British climber once gave that inner drive a name: Feed the Rat.

Today’s message is about what that drive represents and how to feed it deliberately.

Feeding the Rat

Mo Anthoine was a respected British alpinist who believed certain people carry an internal appetite for difficulty. A drive toward challenge. A pull toward experiences that demand something from them.

He called it the rat. To “feed the rat” meant deliberately choosing meaningful challenges.

His perspective wasn’t a suggestion to recklessly pursue danger. It means being intentional about how you seek out difficulty for your own development and choosing challenges that stretch your capacity.

In that sense, feeding the rat becomes a periodic self-audit. A way to find out whether who you think you are aligns with who you actually are when things get hard.

When things are easy or comfortable, it’s hard to know what you’re really capable of.

Any professional athlete could compete against a group of 10-year-olds and look successful. But without the right level of challenge, there’s no growth and no honest picture of skill or readiness.

Challenge changes that. It shows you how you actually respond, not how you think you would. That’s what feeding the rat is really about. It’s about how you embrace challenge, tolerate uncertainty, and respond when things get difficult in your craft or your life.

Expanding Comfort Zones

The less we challenge our comfort zone, the more it begins to shrink. Like a muscle, if it isn’t trained, it weakens.

It’s no different than physical training. If you run the same distance at the same pace every day, your body adapts. Eventually, the effort plateaus. To keep developing, you have to stretch by running farther, running faster, or both.

Now this doesn’t mean you have to expand your limits all at once, but it is helpful to do so gradually. Here’s a clip of free solo rock climber, Alex Honnold, discussing how he applies this mindset to accomplishing goals that many believe are near-impossible.

Confidence doesn’t come from staying comfortable. It certainly isn’t built by avoiding struggle. If abilities are never stressed, they’re never tested. And if they’re never tested, they can’t be trusted under pressure.

High performers tend to understand this over time. Every new level they reach brings a new demand, a different kind of difficulty they have to grow into. Stretch has been part of the process at every step.

Tom Brady was once asked how he defines mental toughness and he directly correlated it to stretching outside your comfort zone.

Now I don’t want to belabor this point, but I do want to share one last example that comes from another performance arena: Acting.

For years, Jason Segel built a successful acting career playing familiar roles in comedies (e.g. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, How I Met Your Mother, I Love You, Man, etc.). Then, at 33, he was offered a dramatic role portraying David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour. He wasn’t sure he could do it and, by his own admission, he was scared (you can watch his interview here).

In the end, the movie received glowing reviews at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and Segel’s individual performance garnered more praise. He went on to win multiple Best Actor and Best Male Lead awards. He added, “The End of the Tour is the movie that changed my career and my approach to acting.”

If growth is part of your goal, then stretching outside your comfort zone needs to be deliberately built into your plan. Stretching is the price of moving forward.

A Deliberate Discomfort Challenge

During spring training one year, our Sports Medicine and Performance Team committed to a seven-day challenge.

Each day, we had to step outside our comfort zone. It couldn’t always be the same type of challenge. One day it might have been physical, the next day it might have been more mental (e.g. having a conversation you’d been avoiding, practicing a skill that didn’t feel fully refined yet, or trying a new technique you weren’t confident in, etc.).

The only rule was simple: It had to stretch you.

My invitation is to explore, convert, and implement this challenge with your own teams. Proactively invite individuals to choose one way they’ll stretch themselves for the day and then create space at the end to have them reflect on how it went.

For coaches, I’d strongly encourage this to be something you do as a staff and not just for your players. We ask our players to live outside their comfort zones every day. This is a gentle reminder to model the same standard ourselves.

Final Thoughts

The rat is the part of you that needs challenge to grow. When you feed it deliberately, you build capacity you can trust when things get hard and confidence will inevitably follow.

PS — We’ll discuss some of this in greater detail during the free webinar on January 14th. If you (or someone you care about) is interested in attending, here again is the registration link to confirm your spot: Register Here.

Inspiration for This Piece

• Cory Shaffer — Shoutout to him for introducing me to the “Feed the Rat” metaphor!

• Billy Oppenheimer — His “Six at 6” newsletter and the Jason Segel story.