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Today’s episode features an extraordinary guest, Todd Herman, globally recognized peak performance coach and the mind behind the transformative “alter ego” methodology. Todd Herman has worked with legendary athletes such as Kobe Bryant and top performers across sports, business, and entertainment. Through decades of coaching high achievers, Todd Herman has gained profound insight into the real drivers of sustainable success—and it all starts with your identity.
This conversation dives into why mindset, personal identity, and emotional regulation are just as critical as strategy and discipline when it comes to building lasting wealth and achieving your highest potential. Todd Herman demystifies the process behind his acclaimed “alter ego” approach, a framework used by elite performers to unlock confidence, clarity, and execution, both on and off the playing field.
Listeners will discover how intentionally designing the identities you step into can lead to breakthroughs across life’s most important roles, whether as an entrepreneur, leader, parent, or athlete. Todd Herman also reveals how qualities like playfulness and enthusiasm are essential for entering sustained flow states and achieving extraordinary results.
In This Episode
- The five phases of building a powerful alter ego
- How your language and beliefs directly shape your financial outcomes
- The importance of playfulness, enthusiasm, and emotional regulation for peak performance
- Practical steps to practice and shift your personal identity for lasting transformation
Everything can be practiced, even a shift in our identity and the way that we see ourselves and the way that we relate to other people. It’s all just skill and deliberateness and the practice of it, repetitively doing something over and over and over again.
How’s it going, everyone? And welcome back to Wealth Strategy Secrets Of The Ultra Wealthy. Today we’re diving into one of the most overlooked but most powerful drivers of success, your identity and mental game. My guest, Todd Herman, is a world-renowned peak performance coach who’s worked with elite athletes like Kobe Bryant and top performers across business, sports, and entertainment. In this episode, we unpack how the highest achievers don’t just rely on discipline. They intentionally design the identity they step into to perform at their best. We explore why peak performance is actually a wealth strategy. How your language and beliefs shape your financial outcomes, and how emotional regulation and mindset separate those who thrive from those who stay stuck. Todd also breaks down his powerful alter ego framework used by world-class performers to unlock new levels of confidence, clarity, and execution.
If you’ve ever felt like something is holding you back from your next level, this conversation will give you the tools to break through. Todd, can you walk us through the five phases of the alter ego approach?
Yeah. So one thing to keep in mind, I know I kind of mentioned it earlier as well, is there’s no one identity that any of us have. We, as human beings, act in context to our environments or maybe the role that we’re stepping into. So I say this because we don’t have a general alter ego. We don’t build an alter ego that operates across every single domain of our lives. That’s an improper way to actually use. Really, what is the human experience anyway? So the first phase is always being very clear about if I am going to build out like a more deliberate or intentional identity for myself inspired by an alter ego. What’s the role that I’m stepping into?
Maybe the field of play or the area that I really want to be showing up more powerfully. So it could be I’ve got the alter ego of Mr. Rogers and my own dad for a dad. And that was born out of the fact that here I was; I’m in. So this goes back now 13 years because that’s when my daughter was born, my oldest daughter was born. You know, I’ve been spending 17 years up until then coaching really high-performing, high-achieving athletes, some of them with massive egos. So I needed to really build in my coaching life and career life a challenger kind of archetype. Right.
But when I thought about it, and I’m being very—I’m very intentional about my roles, and that’s, you know, also kind of what I’m known for: teaching people and training people and coaching people on this. When I thought about being a dad, I didn’t really think that the challenger archetype was going to be that successful in it. So I’m like, “Okay, well, I want to be more kind and patient and like all of these; I’m actually walking through the process.” Even as I’m saying it, I’m in that role. And I thought, okay, well then Mr. Rogers and my own dad are my sources of inspiration. So what I just did there was I was very clear about the role that I’m going into. That’s where I want to be very intentional with how I show up.
So now step two is if you’re already operating in that role. So maybe it’s because I know with the types of listeners that there are, you know, listening to you, high-achieving people, high-net-worth people, more than likely operating and running businesses or companies. Some people, if you’re someone who starts a business, have a really high sense and function well around starting things and having the grit and perseverance to do them. Maybe the blind spot is in giving up control, delegating to other people. So now when we take a look at the role of you running the business or stepping truly into a CEO identity, it’s like, hey, now what’s getting in the way? That’s step two. So in this role, is there anything that’s getting in the way? Anything that you’re not liking, how you’re showing up right now, what’s the blind spot or the behavior that you don’t like? For me, when I first started my business and I was in, you know, promotion and trying to promote, I would avoid it; I wouldn’t promote. I didn’t see myself as a salesperson necessarily. I was really good at coaching but terrible at actually marketing and selling my business.
So I built up a new identity in that area, and that was to overcome three main things. I was insecure, you know, and I wasn’t very articulate with describing the value of the business that I had and terrible at taking action, avoiding things. So now to go to the flip of that, this is like the third phase of it. Well, what are the traits, the qualities, and the attributes that you do want in that role? Want to be more decisive, articulate, and confident. Those were my three. And from those three, once I’m very well aware of Dave, like, what are the traits and the qualities that you want to bring into a role in your life? Now we can start to use the alter ego part of it. We are a source of inspiration for it. Because then I’m like, you know, just even going back to the conversation about Kobe, once I knew what his real issues and challenges were, that’s how we could build the snake as the alter ego. Because his actual big issue was he was starting to now think about what it was going to sound like when he was on the court.
Whereas that was brand new. He never heard trash talk from the stands or from people on the sidelines before. But now when he was thinking about the upcoming season, he could kind of hear the game that was. That’s why he would use it. That’s why, you know, when I’m in the HBO documentary on his life and he says, “I feel like I’m losing my edge.” And I said, “No, you’re going through an ego death.” Because he’s using the words “I’m losing my edge.” Because he’s now visualizing and seeing in his own mind or hearing the game in a completely different and foreign way.
But now that I knew that that was really the big cause of pain for him. What he didn’t like, again, going, step two, what I don’t like about the way that I’m showing up in this role of being a basketball player is that I’m hearing the game.
The snake became a very natural archetype or alter ego because snakes can’t hear; snakes don’t have sound. That’s why I was choosing that as the alter ego source for him. It was either going to be that or something robotic in a way. So step one, choose the role. Step two, what’s getting in the way of you showing up powerfully in that role? Sometimes it’s mostly because people haven’t really thought through the qualities that they really want to bring into that role. So step three is, what are the traits that you want? What is the way that you want to show up in that? I would like it if you would feel really transformational if this actually became a way that you operated naturally, which is the process that happens for people, because if you practice something long enough, it becomes more natural for you. So if 3 are the traits of 4, well, who or what is your source of inspiration? Could be an animal, could be someone from history. Could be a superhero or a character from a movie or a television show.
Could be someone from your own life, or it could be something that you just create on your own, like Beyoncé did with Sasha Fierce or, you know, kind of hundreds and thousands of others that I’ve created with people over the years. And then we now go into step five, which is now, how are we going to deliberately flick the switch on this? That’s vernacular people talk about all the time, right, Dave? You’ve heard it like, “Hey, man, I just flicked the switch.” Well, I. I’m actually in the place of helping people build the switch. What’s? How do we activate this thing? Where does it live? Like, you know, does it. I’ve had authors and writers who people wanted to write more with a lot less sort of resistance where they lived in the chair. The moment their ass cheeks hit the chair, that’s where, boom, the alter ego comes alive, or that persona comes alive.
That character, an athlete, could be living on the court, on the field, or with someone else. For me, it was the glasses. The moment I put on the glasses and the. The act of my arm, of my glass going past this part of my skull, past my ears, was the switch being flicked. And that’s when I would step into Super Richard, who was the confident, decisive, and articulate version of me, who could go out and promote my business, but I had to practice it.
Yeah, love that. Todd, how many typical alter egos, you know, can you really manage at one time? Or can you? You know, do you recommend it for people? Right. Because as you mentioned, you talked about being a father. Maybe someone’s managing being an athlete, or, you know, how?
What would you recommend in terms of that?
At the end of the day, the thing that makes this so powerful for people, in my experience of doing this for such a long time, is we can’t forget that the thing that makes it work is our creative imagination, which makes this very playful. And playfulness is this sort of final domino that allows flow state and peak performance to take over. It kind of gets lost in the conversation around flow state and peak performance. But when you see a young little kid play and they’re lost in the activity, they’re just playing. And we, as adults, when we get older, we sort of disconnect from that in some ways. So I say that because there is no limit to the amount of alter egos. But I would. If someone’s brand new to this and you’re going to start to make this.
Come on. Start with one. Pick a very important area of your life that you like; you want to make a shift in that. It would make a big impact. But I have five very deliberate ones. Because the thing that sits underneath this is, hey, when I’m switching roles in my life and I’m coming off of this and I’m going to move to it later this afternoon. I’ve got a meeting with my team now. That’s me stepping into the role of being a CEO now.
I need to be a leader. I’m not Coach Todd at this moment. I have elements of coaching that I can be doing with my team, but I need to be aware of the dashboard of my business. And what I hear a lot of people say is they go and they excuse away their own poor behavior. I’m not really a systems person. Like, oh, well, how’s that working for you? It’s not. So I’m very deliberate about these five key roles in my life and who and what I’m inspired by. And now, because it’s such second nature to me, do I need to explicitly think about the transformation? No, it’s so automatic for me.
Yeah. I’d love to underscore that point you made around the playfulness. And, you know, I think a lot of people miss that. And if you really look at, you know, the scale of consciousness and resonating at a higher frequency. Right. Playfulness and joy are so high up there. Right. And that’s when you can really access that, you know, that flow state and just that higher level of consciousness to really be able to do extraordinary things well.
You can’t access extraordinary results without elevating how you think, feel, and show up.
And even another word that sits there, too, is “and I,” you know, I love it. The peers that I get to be around and learn from others who have, you know, had the chance to access and be around incredible people. And one thing that comes up, like Steve Wozniak, I saw him speak once, you know, co-founder of Apple with Jobs. And one thing that both I learned from him watching him on stage and then him talking about other leaders, was he felt like one of the core qualities that you need in order to be something special in your marketplace or your area is enthusiasm. You have to have an enthusiasm for your idea. And that was always what he took away from the people that he came in contact with that were really successful: whether they were extroverted or introverted. It didn’t really matter, but they were really enthusiastic about their idea or their business or their sport or their art that they did. They had an enthusiasm for it.
And then when you think about showing up for other people, if when you bring that energy to something, you just. You literally separate yourself away from other people because of that. Like, I am. I’m not enthusiastic about alter egos because I’m the one who wrote the book on it. I’m enthusiastic about it because I’ve seen how transformational it’s been for people. And it was very much by accident that I had discovered it. It was only just through doing the work of coaching other people that this common thread started revealing itself. That, hey, the best of the best that I’ve had the chance to coach.
Keep on talking about this persona, this character, and so there’s. For me, it’s just a natural enthusiasm in seeing how it’s transformed people. All the different ways that people have used it that I would have never even guessed. They’ve taken the book or the idea and they’ve manufactured it in a completely different way. And that’s really cool. So joy, playfulness, enthusiasm, which literally in its root form means to breathe life into someone else.
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If that resonates with you, go to contrarianwealthbuilder.com and reserve access. It’s quick, it’s free, and it may completely change how you look at your wealth strategy. If you could give just one piece of advice to the audience about how they could accelerate their own peak performance in human optimization, what would it be?
The most powerful shifts happen when you intentionally design how you show up in each role of your life.
One is to understand that any shift that we’re going to make involves practicing it. I think one of the worst, even though we’re talking about flicking switches day before, I’m talking about it in the sense of after we’ve gone through the process and we’re building something, we can learn to deliberately practice flicking the switch. I’m not saying that all of a sudden magically, because you know about alter egos. Does your life transform immediately? It takes deliberate practice. And one of the key things that has set a lot of, I’d say, my clientele free is understanding that we’ve all practiced ourselves into being the way that we’re being right now when we didn’t deliberately think about it. Like there are many influences that cause Dave to show up how he does right now from a lot of times from when you were a kid and you didn’t choose to be around that family or that group of people that you’re around necessarily, and yet it still will rule some of your behavior. So if it’s true that we’re influenced and we practiced ourselves into being ourselves, that means we can also practice ourselves into being the type of person that we most want to show up with. So that’s just the one thing that I try to encourage people with: everything can be practiced, even a shift in our identity and the way that we see ourselves and the way that we relate to other people. It’s all just skill and deliberateness and the practice of it, repetitively doing something over and over and over again.
And when you do it with the idea of what you most want to, the intrinsic motivation that gets pulled out of you is that you just hit a different gear. You hit a completely different gear because of it.
Awesome. Todd, I really appreciate this masterclass today on peak performance and you sharing all of this wisdom. If people want to learn more about you and your work, where’s the best place they can connect?
Well, Todherman.me is my home base on the Internet with kind of links that go out to all the other different businesses or projects that I’m involved with, including the link to my book as well. And then on there I have a once-a-week article and newsletter that I send out to people who are committed to leading a life that is actualized for themselves. So a peak life is how I would frame it for other people.
Excellent. Thanks again, Todd. Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Dave. Thanks for listening to this episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets. If you’d like to get a free copy of the book, go to holisticwealthstrategy.com.
If you’d like to learn more about upcoming opportunities at Pantheon, please visit pantheoninvest.com; that’s pantheoninvest.com.