The Basketball Podcast: EP358 with Dr. Alex Auerbach on How to Perform Better

Alex Auerbach Quotes:

“I tried to tackle a few meaty subjects in a short 10-chapter guidebook . . I tried to keep it pragmatic, actionable, easy to digest, and most importantly, I tried to not produce one of those books where you basically read the same concept for 300 pages.”

“Everyone wants to feel more confident. Everyone wants to feel better about their ability to perform. One of the things that happens throughout your career in sport, and it happens at some peak inflection points . . but it can happen even after simple mistakes or setbacks, is losing confidence or having shaken confidence.”

“To be able to maintain your confidence through something, to have some ability to make that transition effectively, is part of what separates the good from great. In the book, I talk about the idea of self-efficacy which is really believing that you can execute a specific skill in a specific context. It’s not this global confidence where I feel great about myself all the time; it’s, ‘I believe that I can do this thing.’”

“That transfer of confidence . . boils down to believing that the training that you’re doing is helping you move in the right direction, that it’s getting you 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 to help yourself get into the right mindset around believing in all that training.”

“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.”

“We all have something that we do uniquely well that makes us special. 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 great recipe for becoming successful at whatever it is you choose to do.”

“We’ve all been indoctrinated into this belief that stress is a problem, stress is harmful. The reality of stress is, 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.”

“What this boils down to is seeing stress as a challenge or an opportunity for growth or for demonstrating what it is that you’re good at. They found that Navy SEALS who have this mindset ended up being better performers individually, but also better teammates because of the way that they talked helped their teammates embrace the stress enhancing mindset, too. You’ve seen this with great athletes. It’s the players who shout the simple ‘Let’s go!’ or ‘keep working’ or ‘this is our chance to show what we’re made of.’ All that messaging helps everybody see stress as an opportunity.”

“70% of our behavior is shaped by our environment . . We’re all a sum of the people we spend the most time around, which is why our teammates are so important . . 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.”

“There was just a study published in Northwestern that showed that if you sit within 30 feet of a high performer, your performance improves 15%. If you sit within 30 feet of an underperformer, your performance drops 25%.”

“What we know is your brain is constantly predicting what it thinks is going to happen next. 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. 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. On a neurochemical brain level, your mind is responding to what’s going on in the world around you. It would be great if the world around you is facilitating good neurochemistry so you can perform well.”

“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 . . Your brain is a predicting machine. Your brain is anticipating what’s going on next.  Well, 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.”

“You’ve got to figure out how you create a 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. 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.”

“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.”

“If you can get people to buy into this idea that this is an investment in future performance and not time away from the task at hand, you start to see some really cool behavioral things. So, 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 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 rested are more emotionally regulated and make better decisions.”

“This comes from a really interesting line of research called the cybernetic big five theory. 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 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.”

“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.”

“The way I think about peak performance . . the mental side is remarkably simple. It’s not easy, but it’s simple . . A lot of peak performance is really about first uncovering the obstacles that are internal to a player performing well. Typically, those obstacles are ineffective thinking, mismanagement of emotion, ineffective behavior, and occasionally off the rails physiology. Basically, four broad buckets. We can call them all sorts of things . . but the idea is those are our internal experiences that we need to give people the skills to navigate most effectively.”

“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. 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 . . so you want to teach players skills to manage that performance anxiety and control that emotion to be a bit more helpful.”

“You’ve got to create a culture where you’re constantly be receiving feedback and you need to be asking often, ‘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 telling 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.”

Alex Auerbach Breakdown:

Alex Auerbach Selected Links from the Podcast:

Dr. Alex Auerbach
Called To Greatness: Your Personal Playbook for the Pursuit of Excellence
Steph Curry
Owen Eastwood
Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness