By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
A former Kansas City Chief who now helps people and organizations with leadership training and performance says it all began when concussions forced him to retire.
Jon McGraw played professionally for 10 years before a series of concussions motivated him to retire and, then, to consider brain health and how the brain works.
“And so I’m thankful in a lot of ways for that, because I’ve learned a ton and have been able to do a lot of things to help heal my brain,” McGraw tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post in an interview after he spoke to the 2024 St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce Chairman’s Breakfast. “It’s a big concern for a lot of my former teammates and a lot of current players right now. It’s an evolving process of learning what’s really going on with the brain and what happens when concussions happen.”
McGraw co-founded Vision Pursue which advises corporate teams and sports franchises. McGraw drew a large crowd to the breakfast held at the Stoney Creek Hotel and Conference Center.
McGraw was drafted by the New York Jets after playing for legendary coach Bill Snyder at Kansas State. He was traded to the Detroit Lions, but signed with Kansas City where he ended his career.
McGraw says much of what his company teaches is counter intuitive, often having to spend quite a bit of time teaching employees how to unlearn conventional wisdom, such as that stress is bad.
“Short term, you’re in a stressful situation, you’re getting ready to go up and speak in front of a bunch of people on stage. You should feel sweaty palms and your heart beating. That’s all really, really good stuff. Or you think of an athlete getting ready to perform. That kind of stress is really, really good,” according to McGraw. “A lot of what we’ve been taught in our culture is that it is not, right? You want to be confident and calm and that’s just not the way the brain-body system works.”
McGraw says stress is the way your brain and body prepares you to perform.
Stress is ever present in a career, McGraw says, and needs to become a motivator not a deterrence to performance. A key according to McGraw is to find joy in the process, not just to seek it in the end result.
“But learning how to spread that out over the entire process; in performance psychology it’s often referred to as process orientation where most of your attention is going to the process itself, the daily task of what it takes to get where you want to go,” McGraw says. “Now, you still enjoy the realization of that final goal when you get there, but it’s more about the journey than the destination, right? We’ve all heard that before, but it takes a little bit training in our culture, because our culture has made the destination primary.”
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