Alex Auerbach on How to Perform Better (EP358)

Excited to welcome performance psychologist Dr. Alex Auerbach to the basketball podcast. Dr. Alex Auerbach has spent his career exploring how high performers, from athletes to business leaders, deliver superlative results and make meaningful progress towards achieving their full potential. Called to greatness, his new book unveils the secrets he's discovered about how to perform at your best when it matters most. Arbuck is a licensed counseling and sports psychologist, certified mental Performance Consultant and board certified coach working in professional sports. He's worked with elite teams and performers from a range of domains including The NBA and NFL, Olympians, Army Special Forces, Fortune 5 companies and venture backed startups.

Hey Coach, A brief time out from the podcast to bring you the analytics minute sponsored by HoopSolytics. If you watch a lot of basketball game video like we do, you always see things you'd like to remember or share. Being able to capture, organize, retrieve and share plays, sets and actions with a playbook for your coaching staff and players will make your teams and overall programs that much better. Hoopsalytics now includes an integrated playbook organizer that can do the following for you. Add plays including text descriptions, diagrams, other images and videos from just about anywhere. Link to real life examples of these plays from your game videos. Categorize playbook entries as plays, actions, drills, moves and other categories. Add attributes for different entries like man, zone, needed to, etc. Star entries to feature For a team Like Things to Learn Before a practice, HoopSolytics brings the most powerful analytics to teams of all levels. It's easy to use and affordable. It's like AI for basketball coaches. Visit hoopsalytics.comball today that's H O O P S A L Y t I c s.com ball today to learn more and start analyzing your games for free.

Alex welcome to the podcast and congratulations on the book called to Greatness.

Thank you for the congratulations and thanks so much for having me. It's. It's an honor to be here. I'm looking forward to it.

Just some small topics covered in the book. Just discover how to optimize your energy, sharpen your focus, build unshakable confidence. Man, I cannot wait to read the book and just diving in. I can't encour encourage people to follow you on twitter and all the different things you share already. Great stuff. I know the book's going to be amazing.

Thank you. Yeah, I tried to tackle a few meaty subjects in a short 10 chapter guidebook essentially, but I'm hopeful it's helpful to people. I tried to keep it pragmatic actionable, easy to digest, and most importantly, to not produce one of those books where you basically read the same concept for 300 pages. I tried to introduce enough meat to keep you going.

The word I love there is actionable. Maybe let's start with that. Just some ideas around unshakable confidence. Because being in the youth space now, having coached at the college, being around pros, confidence is something that affects all levels of players.

Yeah. And I think it's one of those things where talking about parents or young athletes or even NBA athletes, everyone wants to feel more confident, right? Everyone wants to feel better about their ability to perform. And I think one of the things that happens throughout your kind of career in sport, and really it happens at some peak, kind of inflection points, moments of transition, but it can happen even after simple mistakes or setbacks, is losing confidence or having shaken confidence. Right. The example I always give from my own career, and you know this from doing some work with the NBA too, is when a guy gets drafted even fourth overall or fifth overall or first overall, for their last decade, they've been the best player on their team, and now they're showing up to an NBA roster where there might be four other guys who are drafted just as high or right around the same place who have five or more years in the league who are a little bit ahead of them. And now all of a sudden you're like the 10th best guy on your team. And to be able to main your confidence through something like that, to have some ability to make that transition effectively, I think is part of what separates the good from great. And so in the book, I talk about the idea of self efficacy, right? Which is really believing that you can execute a specific skill on a specific context. It's not this global confidence. I feel great about myself all the time. It's I believe that I can do this thing. And then I talk a little bit about having confidence in your abilities, your unique strengths that allow you to do what you do. So in the basketball context, like understanding what gets you on the floor and keeps you on the floor and makes you unstoppable, and then believing that you can achieve your goals. Right. And I think those are a couple different things. And again, walk you through what it looks like to set goals and monitor that process for yourself in the book. But the idea is that if you can stack evidence that you can do it, that you can do the job, right? If you can recognize and double down on your unique signature strengths and really work to maximize that, and if you can see yourself consistently make progress on your goals. You've got a really strong foundation for unshakable confidence.

Talk to us specifically relative to confidence about the transfer from practice to competition, because again, that seems to be a big barrier for some players. You referenced youth players, etc. Just that ability to be able to transfer that confidence. They may have it in practice, they may be able to do it in practice, but doing it in game is a different deal.

No doubt. And actually tackled this a bit in one of the chapters, chapter six, about preparation. Right. So there's a lot in the transfer of practice to games, whether it's confidence or skill.

Right.

That really boils down to the way that you prepare and the way that you practice and the way that you tune into what goes on. And so for me, when I think about that transfer of confidence specifically, I think a lot of that boils down to believing that the training that you're doing is helping you move in the right direction, that it's getting you actually ready to play and that you're doing what you need to do to be ready to deliver on game night. It's recognizing the ways in which you've progressed. It's knowing that you've tested the execution of your skill under different circumstances. And then it's really being able to leverage some mental skills like imagery or self talk and to help yourself get into the right mindset around believing in all that training, paying off, trusting yourself, talking to yourself in a way that facilitates that confidence oozing out onto the floor on game night.

I love it. I love the actionable ideas right there. And mindset is such a big thing. And I know you talk about three different kind of areas for being the best in terms of your mindset, but the one thing that I want to bring out is this concept of growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And I'm so grateful you talk about this, that it's okay to have a fixed mindset at times about certain things.

Yeah. This is one of the concepts that. Bless her heart. Carol Dweck wrote an amazing book. Right. And so you want to like, support that. That's great. But the unintentional takeaway, I think, from her book was that growth mindset is great and fixed mindset is bad. And we really. We don't want to be in that space. Right. We don't want this sort of black and white thinking about the qualities of mindset. And the original research that Carol Dweck did showed that the best performers are actually high in both their High end growth mindset and their high end fixed mindset. And when you're in that space, what you get is this great combination of recognizing your unique talents and strengths, appreciating what makes you really great, and believing that those matter for performance, which is of course true, right? Like you have to trust that you have a special signature skill that puts you on the floor and keeps you on the floor and keeps you engaged with your teammates. And then you also have to believe that hard work, effort, persistence, right? Making progress are really important for becoming the best that you can be. That's the high in the growth mindset. But because we've been conditioned to think about fixed mindset is bad, and growth mindset is everything that leads to growth and progress, we've jumbled and fumbled a little bit the real outcomes here. And so I work really closely with athletes to figure out what are the things that make you great and special and how do we double down on that and really emphasize that, and how do we use hard work and effort to really maximize those. And if you're looking for some other stuff on maybe the dark side of growth mindset, if you will, Adam Grant actually just wrote a really interesting piece in the New York Times about the unintended consequences of a growth mindset. And he talks about how students will come to him now and ask for an improvement in their grade. And he'll ask, why should I change your grade? And they'll say, I worked really hard. And that is emblematic of the culture we've created around growth mindset. It's great that you've worked really hard, but sometimes hard work is not enough. Sometimes you actually have to be good at something. You have to deliver real results. And the same is true in the mba. It's true at really anything that's a performance endeavor. You are going to have to pay attention to the results at some point. You. And if you have a real growth mindset, then you'll look at that B instead of an A and you'll say, I'm just not there yet and I need to figure out how to maximize what I can do here. But if we take it too far, we think effort is the only thing that matters. What you get is a bunch of people trying really hard, but not necessarily delivering good outcomes. Love this.

That's such an important concept that you're sharing there. And for me, the one takeaway when I read you talking about this a little bit more was this concept of connecting it back to confidence, right? That actually having a fixed mindset or belief in something that you do better, better than others or you do very well helps you play better.

Yeah. I think you want to get to a point where you understand, again, what makes you special. And with the NBA guys I worked with, it's the best example I can give you from today's NBA is like a Steph Curry, right. Like, Steph is on the floor because he's the world's best shooter. And if he didn't realize that and didn't focus on that and didn't appreciate that, we probably wouldn't be watching a dynasty. Right. We'd be watching an average level NBA player running around. Yeah, he's fast and he makes good cuts and he makes good passes. Like, all that's nice. But if he doesn't figure out that shooting is his signature strength and the thing that keeps him on the floor, we don't get to witness the warriors dynasty and recognizing that. And again, doubling down on that, using that as a source of kind of evergreen confidence, I think is what allows players like Steph to consistently deliver. And of course, he works incredibly hard at his shooting. I'm not saying he doesn't work hard at his shooting. I'm saying he probably works hard at his shooting in part because he recognizes that it's a special skill and in part because he knows it's important for staying on the floor. Right. And so we want to find what those things are. And I believe that everyone has one. We all have something that we do uniquely well that makes us special. And if we can figure out what that is and really harness it and then put good work and hard work behind it, you've got a really great recipe for becoming successful at whatever it is you choose to do.

Coaches love lists. So I'm just going to bring the other three things forward that you said, the three mindsets that separate the best from the rest. First, we just talked about growth mindset with a dash of fixed mindset. The second, stress is enhancing mindset. And the third recovery is an investment mindset. So maybe let's talk about stress is enhancing mindset.

Yeah. So this comes from a really cool line of research done with Navy seals going through BUDS training. And for those who aren't familiar with buds, it's this sort of pinnacle experience and Navy SEAL training where they drag them out to a beach in San Diego and Coronado and ask them to do some ridiculous tasks like carry giant logs across the beach or hold their breath under cold water or whatever it might be. And so some researchers went out and they started to look at what allows seals who have gotten to this point in their training, right? This is the pinnacle experience that it's the place where you're going to be tested the most. And if you get through this, you're going to be a seal, right? So you're like, right there at the end, what allows seals to actually finish that? And why do some seals quit, right? Especially if you think about, like, how hard they've worked to get to this point. Because it's not just the training before this, right? It's all the training before the training and getting in such good physical shape and the other sort of exercises they endure along the way. And then you get here and you crumble. And what they found was there's really three, three and a half mindsets, if you will, that teased apart what allows these seals to persist or desist. So the first is this mindset that stress is debilitating. And this is the one that we've all kind of been conditioned into. In popular Western culture, the idea of stress is bad. You got to get rid of stress. I know when I was growing up, it was, stress is as bad for you as sitting or smoking. Stress is the new cancer, and if you're got a lot of cortisol, you're going to die and blah, blah, blah, right? We've all been indoctrinated into this belief that stress is a problem. Stress is har harmful. And the reality of the stress is just your brain and body preparing you to do something effortful. Cortisol is not a stress hormone. It's an energy and an action hormone, right? It's just getting your body ready to do something. But if you frame it as, oh, gosh, I gotta get rid of this, this is a problem, this is bad. What you get is a bunch of really unhelpful behavior in a performance context. So what they found was SEALs who believed stress is debilitating is they quit sooner. And it makes a ton of sense, right? If you think stress is harmful for you and your goal is to get rid of stress, the easiest way to get rid of stress in any situation is quit. It just doesn't work very well when you're actually working on something hard. Could you imagine, like an NBA player running off the floor with two minutes to go because it's just a little bit stressful? But that's the mentality. And you see this in pro athletes, too. They shut down or they, quote, unquote, hide in the high pressure moments when stress is a bit debilitating. The second mindset they found is this idea that stress is something to just will your way through. And this is the idea around mental toughness or old school notions of nose to the grindstone. And what they found that was really interesting was that SEALs who had this mindset that stress is something to will your way through their own individual performance didn't suffer, but their team performance suffered because they basically put their head down, went tunnel vision, and, like, just focus on my thing right here. And so that works really well if you're an individual. But if you're a leader or a teammate and you stop doing the things that help your team, that's problematic. So these seals individually did okay, but their team suffered. And as a result, that, of course, hurts their own individual standing in the process of going through kind of SEAL training. Right. The half mindset I reference is an offshoot of growth mindset, and distress is debilitating mindset that came out, and there's still more work to do here. But it's this idea that failure is a learning opportunity. And what they found was that some SEALs who framed this, oh, if I give up or if I fail, it's not a big deal because I'll have learned something. They also gave up sooner. Right. And I don't know about you, but I don't want an NBA player with two minutes to go thinking, oh, if we lose, it's okay, like, maybe we'll learn something. Of course that's true, but that's not the attitude I want you to have in the context of peak performance. And so this sort of like, offshoot of the growth mindset, again, this idea that, oh, all failure is a learning opportunity in some circumstances is actually quite harmful and undermines high performance. And so they found that some of these seals had this mindset that, oh, if it doesn't work out, it's okay. And in theory, yes, but if you actually want to win or be successful at what you do in the moment, it's not helpful to be thinking, it's okay if I lose. Right. I want you to be thinking about, how do I close this game out and win? Which gets us to the third and kind of final mindset, which is this idea that stress is enhancing. And really what this boils down to is seeing stress as a challenge or opportunity for growth or demonstrating what it is that you're good at. And what they found is that seals who have this mindset, they ended up being better performers individually, but also better teammates because the way that they talked helped their teammates Embrace the stress enhancing mindset too. And you've again seen this with, with great athletes. It's the players who shout the simple let's go or keep working or we've got this, or this is our chance to show what we're made of, right? All that messaging helps everybody see stress as an opportunity. And so sure enough, that energy gets channeled in a right way. You've got the seeing it as a challenge instead of a threat and performance raises. And what we found is that there's really four ways to frame stress to get into this. Stress is enhancing mindset. I know you like actionable, so I'm going to give you some actionable stuff here. So the first is seeing stress as a challenge, right? Simply my back's against the wall, I'm going to show you what I got. The second is seeing stress as an opportunity to demonstrate a signature strength, right? This is my chance to show what I'm made of or show how hard I've worked. The third is seeing stress as excitement, right? So nervousness and excitement feel very similar physiologically. You've got the racing heart and the sweaty brow and all that stuff, right? But if we can get you to turn that nervousness into excitement or energy, what we find is that your performance improves. And then the fourth is determination. And I talked earlier about seeing stress as just your brain and body preparing you to do something effortful. If you can see this stressor as a sign that I'm determined to deliver a result or determined to get to the finish line, that tends to tap into this stress as enhancing mindset as well.

That's beautiful, man. Every coach, you should just copy out that part and share it with all your athletes. That's tremendous. And obviously looking at some of these cliches that we throw around as coaches and just logically analyzing them say, no, it's not exactly that. And that's beautiful too. So I'm going to come back to the third thing a little bit about recovery, because I know we're going to cover that a little bit in how I approach the next thing, which is your, I guess, framework for peak performance with a team. Then you talked specifically about your work with the Toronto Raptors, but the first thing you talked about, which I could not agree more, is environment. And I want you to connect that for us with what you've already talked about, but talk specifically about the importance of creating this environment.

So I'll try to connect the dots first and then I'll broaden out to environment. So the connecting the Dots is what we know from mindset research is that the people around us have an outsized role in shaping the way that we view the world. Right. And as this is sort of intuitive and makes sense, but when we actually think as coaches or even performance psych folks about player performance, we think a lot about the mindset as something going on between the ears and not so much about mindset being a function of the messaging happening around us. Right. So the original research around achievement motivation and motivational climate shows if parents, coaches and peers emphasize hard work and effort, that's what gets you a growth mindset. That's a huge part of the battle for a growth mindset. If they emphasize outcomes, that's part of where you get a fixed mindset. And so we've recognized for a long time that the what goes on around you really matters for the way you perceive the world. And so then as I'm thinking about that broadly in my lens, thinking about the environment and culture I try to create, I recognize how important environment is. And I have a good friend, Owen Eastwood, who I'm sure you're familiar with, wrote a book called Belonging that's all about environment. And he was the one who gave me this stat at one point. But he said something around 70% of our environment, 70% of our behavior, excuse me, is shaped by our environment. So I went on a little bit of a research deep dive, and it's. That's a pretty spot on number. There's a range, right? Some studies are 65%, some studies are 80. But there's a lot of your behavior that's determined by what's going on around you and by what happens with the people who are around you. Right. We're all a sum of the people we spend the most time around. Right. Which is why our teammates are so important. And so when I think about creating an environment, I think oftentimes people go to one extreme, which is we've got to live these values on the wall, and this is exactly how we do it. Or they don't pay any attention to it at all, and they assume it's all up to the individual guys to figure it out. And the structure that's really resonated with me is self determination theory. Right. If we can give people a sense of autonomy and control in this environment, if our environment can emphasize mastery and progress, and if we can stay focused on connection with each other, we can create a really powerful environment for people to perform at their best. And sure enough, there's tons of data now that backs up these ideas, right? So there was just a study published in Northwestern that showed that if you sit within 30ft of a high performer, your performance improves 15%. If you sit within 30ft of a underperformer, your performance drops 25%. And there's countless studies that have now replicated a similar finding. And so we know without a doubt that the environment is shaping the way that you think, feel, and perform. The question is, how do you make it as good for you as possible? And that's why I start with environment. Because if it is influencing 70% of your behavior, that's the highest leverage thing you can get, right? And we all know this intuitively. If you've ever worked a crappy job, you didn't feel good. From the moment you got in your car to the moment you got out, to the moment you walked in, you felt. You don't feel like yourself. You can't wait to go home. No one's performing well in that environment. In contrast, if you've worked a great job with a great boss, you're excited to show up. You look forward to some of the things you're going to be challenged with, and that draws. Draws the best out of you. And of course, we. We want to set up environments that really bring out the best in people. And again, that's what I think is so fascinating and interesting about this. And so I'll leave you with one final science nugget here, if that's okay, Because I think this is the stuff that tends to really hammer home this concept for people. But what we know is your brain is constantly predicting what it thinks is going to happen next. And so now we've got some really cool data that shows that the neurochemistry in your brain actually starts to change from the moment you anticipate going somewhere. So from the moment you get in your car and start anticipating going to work, the neurochemistry in your brain is changing to accommodate what it expects to find at work, right? So on a neurochemical brain level, your mind is responding to what's going on in the world around you. Of course, it would be great if the world around you is facilitating good neurochemistry, right? So you can perform well. So I'll get off my nerdy soapbox here for a minute, but that's why I think it's so important.

I love the nerdy soapbox. And honestly, that's what we're trying to do as a whole. I think about, like, how basketball coaches, if I talk specifically about them, have embraced analytics and they can all talk points per possession and all this detail, but they haven't gone on in as in depth on motor learning, skill acquisition, sports psychology, performance based things as much. And I think these conversations help further it. So please geek out all you want. For me, what I connect is I like you talked about mindset, you talked about stress creating an environment. To me, it connects back to what I share a lot is coaches need to create these game based environments because there's no way to replicate the type of mindset or stress based training without having representative practice. And to me these things intersect together. And maybe I'm off base, but I'd love to hear your opinion on that. I know it's a little harder the professional level where they don't practice as much, but even there they're creating these representative environments through perception and decision and perception, action, coupling and all these different things that connect back to mindset training as much as they are to physical practice.

We're both going to be on our soapbox here, right? But yes, and again, I wrote about this a little bit in the book. I talk about what makes for high quality practice. And so I talk about repetition to gain competence in a skill variation so you can test the skill in different situations and then representativeness as the best thing to lead to transfer into an actual performance. Right. And sports has some of this kind of naturally. Right? You do scrimmages like scrimmages are a good example of representative practice. But you mentioned other ways that you could be thinking about doing this and I think you're exactly right. Ultimately, the more reps we get under conditions that are as close to the competition as possible, the better our performance is likely to be because we're better able to execute what goes on. And if you think about I'll geek out for a minute here again, like the idea that your brain is a predicted machine, right? Your brain is anticipating what's going on next. You first have to start with how do those predictions form? And the answer to that is they form based on past experiences. And so if you have a ton of past experiences with representative practice, your mental model for executing in a game is going to be way stronger. Your predictions are going to be way better than it would be if you stand in the corner and you shoot 5,000 corner threes uncontested. That's great for developing some parts of the skill of shooting a corner 3. It is not great for learning how to shoot a corner three in a game game. Those are very different things. I don't know how many uncontested corner threes you're getting in a game unless you're drawing up some really creative plays and the defense is not so good. Like, you've got to figure out how you create practice that allows players to simulate what the real thing is going to look like, because that real experience is going to be what their mind draws on to execute when it actually matters. And then the mental skills really show up around this kind of predictive machinery to facilitate good predictions. That's what all this is about, right? It's about helping you and your brain be as effective as possible in determining what to do next based on the most accurate data that you can perceive. And so again, if you don't have good representative practice, you're going to be missing a lot of really critical data when you get to the game that's going to help you ultimately make the right decision.

Love it. That's the argument for creating more problems solving situations for players in practice rather than rope learning type of situations. Coaches, it's just, it's awesome. The game prevent provides all these novel situations to try and solve. So that's beautiful now.

Hey coach. A brief interruption of our podcast. You know the best player development is coaching development. So let's work together to get your entire basketball organization or program unparalleled expertise and access to Basketball Immersion's group memberships. It's affordable and your players will thank you. Contact us today. Basketball immersion.com contact page or DM us on X or Instagram. Get your coaches full access to our extensive coaching video library, detailed courses and modern evidence based coaching ideas. You can have proven coach development at your fingertips for all of your coaches. Elevate your coaches, Elevate your teams. Get started now. Basketball Immersion group membership is where innovation meets excellence. Contact us today@basketball immersion.com contact Paige or DM us on X or Instagram. Now back to the podcast.

Connecting this back to. I wanted to come back to recovery, which was the third thing for the three mindsets that separate the best from the rest. And the reason I want to come back to this here is because another part of your environment I know is the foundation, which is well being basics. And I just love that. And I think so many people can control these things more than they do and that's a big part of it. So maybe you can just shape that for us in these two areas.

Yeah. So there's tons of found foundational elements we can get into for the recovery basis. So I'll try to Keep those brief so we don't spend our whole hour, the rest of our hour inadvertently talking about that. That. But I guess starting point for me is recognizing that a lot of the ways that we talk about recovery in sports are antithetical to peak performance, right? So we talk about like I remember when I was coaching, for example, coaching football, I was like a 21 year old kid, tired, walking off practice one afternoon and I said something to one of the other assistants, man, I'm worn down today. Oh, you can sleep when you're dead. And I'm like, I'm going to be dead pretty soon if we keep sleep depriving me. But that's the mentality that exists this in sports, right? Oh, when you're sleeping, the enemy's working. Oh, if you're not getting shots up, something's wrong with you, you're getting worse, blah, blah, blah. Peyton Manning, you're not. If you're not getting better, you're getting worse.

The grinding culture.

Yeah, just slow down. And there's all sorts of science around this. It's the science of adaptive capacity that basically shows if you're going to do some stressing of your brain or body, you need a little bit of rest if you want to maximize the gains. So the example I can give people is the parallel to the physical world, right? If you show up to the gym and you bench today and you bench tomorrow and you bench Wednesday and you bench Thursday and you bench Friday and you keep benching every day for two weeks, eventually you will tear a peck. I promise you, you can just keep benching and you will tear a peck. Not because you're not getting stronger, because something's wrong with you, because your brain and body need rest to recover, right? Your body needs a break for the muscle to repair and come back stronger. Your brain is very similar, right? You need a break. We need time to reflect, to really deepen and synthesize the learning that we have. And in fact, reflection seems to be the single most important thing we can do to actually consolidate the learning from the experiences that we're having in addition to sleep. I think about rest a lot, not as time away from the game, but as an investment in future performance. And I think shifting that mentality to not be like, grind it out, but let's figure out how we tactfully rest, how we do it in a way that facilitates peak performance. And recognize this time away from the gym, time away from practice isn't time. The enemy is getting better and you're getting worse. Right? This Is time that you're recovering to come back as good as you can be tomorrow. So that's the foundational philosophy behind this mindset. And if you can get people to buy into this idea that this is an investment in future performance and that time away from the task at hand, you start to see some really cool behavioral things. For example, there's data that shows that leaders who engage in more post work recovery have more creative and higher performing teams the next day at work work because their teams also take time to recover because they're leaders modeling good recovery behavior. Right? We also know that people who are more arrested are more emotionally regulated and make better decisions. That sounds like coaches to me, right? If your job is to sit here and make a million decisions on a sideline, it'd sure be great to be as rested as you could be because that's going to help you make the best decisions you can make, right? It's not time away, it's time to actually facilitate you performing well. And so what are the ways you can actually engage in rest? So the obvious one is sleep, right? And the basics here are seven to eight hours a night, you can go huberman style and do the early morning sunlight. That's fine. The single most important thing you can do when it comes to sleep is maintain a consistent wake time. Wake time is what regulates your circadian rhythms. It's what helps you feel tired at the end of the day. It's what moves you through your cycle. So oftentimes what happens in sports, the NBA is a great example, you get in at 3am and then everyone sleeps in until noon sometimes. That's the nature of the beast. But to the extent that you can, you'd like to keep your wake time as consistent as possible. Then if you can keep your bedtime as consistent as possible, that'd be great too. And then give yourself an opportunity to actually get that seven, eight hours of rest. Other ways that you can rest there is like physical recovery you can do, right? Float tank, Normatec, right? Massage, all these things that are like active recovery, walk outside time in nature. And then one I really like is play, right? Basically having an opportunity to, to explore a hobby, have some fun, engage in some self guided, self directed learning where you're just experimenting with something novel for yourself. We know that having 20 minutes, even a day to just play and tinker helps people feel more rested, more engaged, more creative. And this is part of the reason why some of the best companies in the world do basically free time, right? Google's famous for this where 20% of their time they give engineers to work on whatever they want. And they found some of the best products in all of Google history have come from this 20% time where people are just allowed to play. Probably the most notable example being gaming email. So you wouldn't even have your normal email if Google didn't allow people to mess around and play a little bit. And that's something I think most people should try to build more into their life if they'd like to have that kind of creativity and engagement.

I'm curious in a coaching context, by the way, all of that was awesome. In a coaching context. I think about it for my young players is that the first five, ten minutes they come into the gym, they self organize basketball games on their own and they play unstructured with no coaching. And to me that's helping connect to the fun. Right. And there's different ways like that. But I'm curious for you specifically from a basketball perspective, are there different ideas like that to be able to incorporate fun? We're not talking about frivolous things, we're talking about things that are just different and unlock the player as you said, coming back to giving them autonomy and freedom to be themselves.

Yeah, look, there's lots of obviously like silly basketball games you can play too. So the unstructured play is a good one. I remember playing knockout as a kid, like things like that. Sort of all players will remember having played like that. Introduced a little bit of competition and fun, half court shooting, whatever it is. But the other thing I'd advocate is like just let them play. Like you don't have to. It doesn't even have to be with the basketball. Right. We had guys with the Raptors who love soccer. So let these guys go out here and kick a hacky sack or juggle for a little bit and just like mess around on the court and have a good time with their friends. It's going to allow them to be a little bit more present and locked in when we actually get to the practice. So don't worry about this time being being silly. Like you want that, you want them to get this out of their system. The human need to explore and create and have a good time so that when it's time to lock into the structure, they're fully ready to go.

All of these I know are bigger answers than even you're giving. But you're doing a great job giving us that tease that again we, we all need to read the book. But one other thing, you talk so much about the science. And the science tells us a different story. And I love that phrasing of this, the one that I wanted you to share, because I know this is a, like a big thing in coaching is that personality is fixed. That's just who they are. So can you talk about actually what the science tells us?

I can, and thank you for bringing this one up. And this comes from a really interesting line of research called the cybernetic Big five theory. And the. The basic principle here is that people organize patterns of behaviors around specific goals that they're trying to achieve. And so what we typically ascribe to people as like a fixed personality trait is probably more aptly described as a pattern of behavior they engage in to reach a specific goal. And what's important about thinking about that is it's not fixed or static. It's not the same in every situation because everyone's goals are a little bit different in different contexts. Right. And so the thing that I've found most helpful about this framing is again, like, I. I've worked with coaches, I won't name any names, but I've worked with coaches where they say, this guy, that's just the way this guy is, is this guy's never going to be a team player. This guy's never going to be in a good mood. This guy's never going to show up and support the way that we need him to show up. And as maybe, but probably more likely this pattern of behavior reflects some other goal that he has. Right. Or she has. And so rather than just assuming this player can't change or can't be helped, why don't we try to uncover what the goal is here and see if we can introduce some alternative ways of behaving that might better facilitate their goal in this environment and context. And what I think this does for coaches is it unlocks a framework for you thinking about how you get more out of your players. And the basics of that framework are identify your players goals. Right. Nick Nurse, when I was with the Raptors, was one of the most tactful coaches I've ever seen. At this, where a lot of coaches, it's happening a ton in the college space right now, run away from the idea of players being paid. Everyone's lamenting nil, money and house money and blah, blah, blah. And this is just part of it. This is part of why everyone is playing the game. And Nick was one of the best in the world at basically being like, this is part of it. And I'm going to lean into it. And I'm going to figure out how to make this work for you. So now all of a sudden, this thing that clearly matters to every player and matters to, honestly, every single person in sports and in life, everyone wants to get paid what they think they're worth. Everyone wants to make more money. Everyone wants to be seen as successful. NBA players are no different. Nick was great again at leaning into that. Right. So now that I've identified your goal, what are the most effective behaviors I can give you? What are the patterns of behavior I can teach you that will facilitate the greatest likelihood of you reaching your goal? Right. So if I want you to be a better teammate, then I need to reward financially great teammate behavior. And I also need to teach you the behavior of being a great teammate and connect those things together. Right. And if I can do that, I'm very likely to get good behavior that supports you being a good teammate, because I've aligned your goals with my goals, with the incentives in an environment that facilitates you doing that. And that's a really good framework for thinking about how you get people to change. And ultimately, the data suggests people evolve a lot over their lifetime. Right. So the idea that there's just one fixed personality, or you've got this, these five traits, and they're never changing is a little bit misguided. The last thing I'll say here is personality does organize around 5 kind of key constructs broadly, right? Conscientiousness, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. So the acronym that we all use, use a psychologist, is ocean. But what it just means is that in different contexts, people are going to have varying degrees of, let's say of extroversion or openness. And again, your goal is to figure out how is this pattern of behavior around, let's say, extroversion, right. Helping or hurting this player's pursuit of their goal. And what should I change to make them more effective at what we do?

So it brings to mind a phrasing, and I don't know where it came from, this concept of are they uncoachable, or do they just need to be coached differently than I am coaching them? And that comes back to us as a coach with that Nick nurse example and finding a way to be able to align things. And I just love that example. Money and team. Those two things go together in terms of that. And it particularly aligns with, obviously, some of the role players in finding their skill that helps the team and then valuing it in that way. Beautiful stuff. I know the big premise of the book, you've worked with so many different types of organizations, including Olympic athletes. And I know one of the things that you talk about is elite performance is 80% mental. Mental. And I think that's common. We hear that. But what I love about that is that obviously you're diving into kind of some of these mental barriers, and I'd love you to just talk about some of those a little bit, because I think that's the important part about this.

Yeah, I guess the way I think about peak performance. I was having this conversation with another sports psychologist earlier today. I think in many ways the mental side is remarkably simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. And so the way I would explain it is like a lot of peak performance is really about, about first uncovering the obstacles that are internal to a player performing well. And typically those obstacles are ineffective thinking, mismanagement of emotion, ineffective behavior. Right. And occasionally off the rails physiology. Right. Basically like four broad buckets. Right. We can call them all sorts of things. Right. Distracted thoughts, unfocused anxiety, depression. Right. But ultimately, like, not to oversimplify those sort of categories of experience, but, but the idea is like, those are our internal experiences that we need to give people the skills to navigate most effectively. And so the common ones for elite athletes, perhaps the most common one, is distraction. And there's some really interesting research again done with Olympians that shows that what inhibits high performance for them is often distracting thoughts about either the past or the future. And there's some data that shows we spend about 48% of our time thinking about the past or future. So it's pretty common to be distracted by something else going on in our life. But if you can learn to minimize the amount of distracted thoughts and maximize the amount of time that you're present, that's a really simple way to improve your odds of performing well. The second internal obstacle that's quite common is difficulty managing emotion. Right. Whether that's you're a little too jacked up and anxious or you're not ramped up enough and you're like too subdued and you're gonna come out slow is what we see. Right. And so you want to teach players skills to manage that performance anxiety, let's say, and control that, that emotion to be a bit more helpful. And we've already talked about stresses enhancing mindset, so those would be some skills that you could layer in here. Third would be obstacles around ineffective behavior. And often, you know, tying it back to the personality phrase, I think Players often don't know what to do that would be most effective, right? And we all have experience of this where we persist in something that isn't maximally helpful because it's just the way we've always done it. And so oftentimes that can lead to some obstacles to reaching the next level of your growth and development. And we want to teach players new ways of behaving, new ways to identify actions or decisions to make so they can be more effective. And that requires some experimenting and iterating and coaching and feedback to really get that. And then the final one I touched on is physiology, right? Where sometimes you're just a little too jacked up. This is the most common one. Like I said, occasionally it could be not jacked up enough. But if you're a little too jacked up, sometimes we just need skills to calm down in the moment, manage that. And so the way I think of these things are, or starting from the bottom, you really need to ground and regulate your nervous system. Then we can figure out how we control and direct your attention. Then we figure out what kind of mental strategies can we use to help maximize your odds of performing well in this given moment. And if we can move you through that progression of skills, we can overcome most internal obstacles that you have and get you back on the path of pursuing your goals and values.

And one of the other barriers that I want you to talk about a little bit, which I think is very common, especially for young players nowadays, is this fear of others opinions that just players now, more than you or I when we were young, exist in this comparative culture through social media. And especially if you're a rising elite player, there's almost never an opportunity to be able to perform without being evaluated. So this concept is a very difficult one for coaches to help players manage.

I think the first thing is to recognize this is actually quite normal, right? So especially if you're coaching say 13 to 17 year olds at that point in their life, nothing's actually more important than their peers, right? Even parents and coaches are relatively less important. Parents have the prime spot until 10 11, coaches have the middle spot for a while and then peers sort of the third spot until 1011. Then around 1213, peers kind of skyrocket above coaches and parents. And so that comparison is just a normal part of being a young growing up kid, exacerbated by social media, where it's very easy to engage in comparison and get the information you're looking for. Did I do better or worse than this other player? And what does that kind of look like. I think just normalizing that and recognizing that as part and parcel of a developmental phase, I think is really important because it reduces the pressure to like, get rid of this comparison. You're not going to get rid of it. This is a normal phase that kids go through. And so what you want to do is figure out how do you lessen the impact of the comparison on the way that they think, feel and perform. And ultimately, the way that I think about navigating that is helping people ground themselves in their values, helping them uncover who they are, and then stay really focused on competing with themselves. Like, how do you become the best version of you? How do you get a little bit better than who you were yesterday? And really focus on that because that's going to be the thing that gets you ahead. I don't know any runner. The example I use a lot is like swimmers or track athletes. I don't know any swimmers who swim faster. Looking at the lane next to them and often looking at the lane next to you is going to make the difference between you winning and losing, right? So you've got to stay very focused on your own process and your own own development and have conviction that what you're doing is going to get you to where you want to be. And if you're engaging in comparison, it might be a sign that you don't have as much conviction in your training or what you need to be doing. And so there may be something for you to look at and refine there. But I think having that sort of attitude around staying very focused on becoming the best version of myself and getting a little bit better than who I was yesterday, I think is really critical. And then the second would be for coaches and parents, older folks in these young athletes lives to provide some perspective. And it may or may not resonate, but oftentimes when you're young, I can certainly think of this for myself, right? Like I think about the sats or acts that I had to take when I was in school, when everyone would take the test, then you all compare yourself and see, oh, am I better or worse than someone else? And to have an adult at that time who would have been like, you know what, it just really doesn't matter. No one's ever going to ask you what your SAT score was ever again after these college applications would have probably been quite a helpful. And so same kind of thing is true in high school sports. And that doesn't mean it's not important or to not care about the games, but it does mean that that third game that you played your sophomore year of high school basketball, where you were really worried about scoring 12 points and your best friend scored 15 and you were less popular the next day or whatever, like you're never going to think about that game again ever in your life. Not because it wasn't important or it didn't matter, but because life is a lot more than the sum of these 15 point games versus 12 point games. And so having some grownup who they listen to, ideally a shed some perspective on that and balance that perspective with the fact that it does matter can be a really effective way of combating that stuff.

In terms of understanding that from a parent's perspective, a coach's perspective, I wanted to go into a little bit of this concept of preparation versus performance, and particularly, how can a coach, a parent, ensure that their player or their son or daughter are mentally prepared for a game without overloading them with information or anxiety? Because I know part of my challenge as a coach and as. As a parent is sometimes that things I say overload my son or daughter or my players with anxiety that I didn't intend. So can you talk to us a little bit about that process?

I'm a big fan of the KISS principle, as I'm sure you've heard, but keep it simple. And I won't share the last word for not knowing how old your audience is. Right.

It's old. It's fine.

Yeah, but keep it simple, sir. Like, keeping it simple, I think is really important. And I know, look, I was a coach at one point too, so I could resonate with some of it. I think the tendency is, and this comes from, I think this idea that more is better. Right. The tendency is to give as much as we can and then let someone else figure it out. And I think what you find is if you do a good job of curating the information you're feeding your players and you keep the playbook really simple, it's actually way, way harder to keep things really simple and to keep things distilled down and keep the scope small and put them in a position to only execute a handful of things really well than it is to throw the kitchen sink at them. And I think that sounds counterintuitive, but it's. That's the reality. And some of the best. I'm a football nerd too, right? So some of the best football coaches, this is what they do. If you watch Chip Kelly's offense, who just won the national championship with Ohio State, a lot of times they're running like the same play out of 17 formations. It's the exact same concept out of a bunch of different ways of looking at. At it. It's not overly complicated. And the rationale is if we can keep it really simple, we're going to get incredible execution at a really small subset of things. And if we can get incredible execution of a small subset, that's much better than average execution at a really large subset. And so having that kind of mentality that keeping it simple is the hard work, that it's the work that puts your players in position to be most successful, I think is really critical to not overloading them. And I think the second thing we need to do is we need to help players understand what's really important. Important. Right. Not all information is created equal. Not all things that are shared need to be internalized to the same degree. And so we have to be really thoughtful about not making everything seem like it's the most important thing we've ever done or ever talked about in the universe that we're living in. And that doesn't mean that what you're saying isn't important, but it does mean if you say everything's important, they're not going to have any clue what's actually important. And then you're going to get a bunch of kind of. Of either overwhelm or check out because it's like this is not realistic and not possible for anyone to process.

I imagine this connects nicely with another thing that you love talking about, which is feedback and giving feedback. And seems like there's a lot of parallels with what you're saying and giving feedback in terms of the KISS principle.

Yeah. And I'm a big advocate of players actually giving feedback to their coaches as much as they can. I think you have to help your coaches figure out how to coach you most effectively.

Is that through organization debriefs, questions and answers, or what's the main way to be able to do that?

Yeah, I can't say that I have a right way for doing that or a best way. I think the way that ways that I've found are most effective are either one. In the moment. If you get feedback from a coach that doesn't work for you or is unhelpful, as quickly as you can after that, accept that feedback and give that feedback to your coach. It doesn't mean be disobedient, but it means your coach yells something at you when you're on the floor. The yelling doesn't resonate for you. You come them off the floor after your rep's done, you pull your coach aside and you say, hey coach, next time it'd be a little bit better for me or more helpful for me if you could do this instead of that. And it can be just as simple as that. And the timeliness of the feedback really matters. I think the second thing to do would be frequent player meetings where you're actually inviting players giving you feedback and you do it enough that you mean it. And what I mean by that is a lot of coaches that I've worked with, they'll do the end of year debrief for the mid year debrief. Do you have any feedback for me? And this is the first time in eight months you've ever asked this player for feedback. And so they're probably going to tell you no because they don't have any clue how you're actually going to react and they have no experience giving you feedback before this point.

And mostly it's not actionable at that time either, is it for the place, the coach?

Yeah, exactly. And so you've got to create a culture where you're constantly receiving feedback and you need to be asking often, what can I do better for you? What can I do better for you? How can I make this more impactful? What can I do differently? Coach me on coaching you, not from a place of tell me how to do my job, but from a place of help me get better for you. If I can become the best coach I could be for you, we're both going to be successful together. And so creating that culture of openness to feedback I think allows those big mid year check ins or end of year check ins to be maximally effective.

We're all active participants with the same goal and that makes sense to me. What you just said called to greatness. Your book again, awesome, congratulations. Is there anything in this book specifically that you, you can direct coaches to that says, hey, this is going to help you? We know this is going to help you. This is awesome.

I think the whole book does that, but I'm biased so.

As you should be by the way.

Thank you. Yes. The chapter I would point you to is the fifth chapter, quality number five called self regulation. And what this is really about. I broke it down into two sections. The first is the ability to control and direct your thinking, feeling and physiology. It's basically like self control. So thinking about developing the skills you need to manage your emotions on the sideline, make better decisions on the sideline, coach your players more effectively, communicate more effectively, A lot of it boils down to that sort of pyramid I talked about earlier, right? Regulating your central nervous system, then directing your attention, then layering cognitive strategies. That's what that first part of that chapter is about. And the second is about self regulated learning, which is a somewhat distinct, somewhat connected concept, but it's actually the concept that underpins deliberate practice. And essentially it's the process of moving players through a cycle of planning and setting goals, monitoring, evaluating progress and iterating and taking them through that as often as possible. That's the foundation of the get 1% better mentality. And so that chapter will give you some really good insight into one how to manage yourself most effectively so you can deliver over the long term and then two how you can maximize your learning for yourself so that you can develop the elite skill you need to be successful.

Awesome. Called to greatness. Available wherever all books are sold. And Alex, I followed you for a long time on X at Alex Arbuck, PhD coaches. It's a tremendous follow, a lot of stimulated thinking, so I can't encourage you to follow there as well. And I know you're on Instagram too, but thank you for all you've done, all you're sharing as well. I love the openness, I love the connection to science and just doing beautiful things for the coaching community and all that are listening.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that. And thank you for having me again and looking forward to doing part two.

Do we're already planning coaches the next one. Just hold on, we'll get them on again.