“Hey, I don't have to be what the world says I am, all this self-doubt, all this negative talk,
I can be, I can live in this NBA Champion coach that I know who I am going to be,”
and now it's about embracing the process of taking what I call 1% steps.
And this makes it not as daunting. 1% steps, anybody can do that daily.
Making a pivot, It's a basketball term where
the defence is all over you or life is just sucking you in and you can't see a clear path,
but you make a small, slight turn, a small pivot and it opens up an entirely new perspective.
And it's, you know change is very daunting for people when you say,
“hey you have to make this big change,” no one, rarely can anyone do it.
But if it's a small, these pivots, these 1% step pivots,
that's what can open up an entirely different perspective and right now
we're all going through a time that we feel stuck. In some situation, we feel stuck.
And that's one of the worst feelings we can have. Me and you, we know that we had to make
our life pivot through sports and we poured everything we could
into playing professional sports, myself the NBA and we had to make that pivot. Like everything
that I did to pour into playing in the NBA was actually for coaching in the NBA.
So it's, it's about looking at something from a slightly different perspective
that can change your entire perspective. My uncle Nick, cause he's a great example of this.
Now, people see him as winning this NBA Championship and they're like,
“oh, first-year head coach, lightning strikes in a bottle...”
No! He's been a head coach for 27 years. And one of my favourite quotes is that it takes
10 years to become an overnight success but in Nick's terms,
27 years to become an overnight success. And I've seen him coaching over in countries
you don't even know play basketball, taking players' ankles,
popping popcorn at halftime. But the thing is he lived in that,
“hey I am an NBA Champion head coach” and when he was 22, when he started his coaching career,
he put a picture of himself holding an NBA trophy on the fridge and he saw that,
every day he lived in that mindset and developed that subconscious awareness of,
“hey, I don't have to be what the world says I am, all this self-doubt, all this negative talk,
I can be, I can live in this NBA Champion coach that I know who I am going to be,”
and now it's about embracing the process of taking what I call 1% steps.
And this makes it not as daunting. 1% steps, anybody can do that daily.
It's not, you have to take the whole, you look at the big macros and then
you take the little micros. Knowing that these steps,
and the most powerful thing there is, is the compounding effect where you stack
these 1% days on 1% days, understanding it's going to
take 27 years to become an overnight success, but if you stay with it, you will get there.
We all grow up learning that certain words mean certain things,
and we attach them like with “failure,” or “success,” or “rich,”
we all think they mean certain things that we're taught, but not necessarily.
Let's take, for example, the NBA as we've been talking about basketball.
So every time I work with a player, I'll ask him, “when was your last shooting slump?”
And then I'll see them already, their body language goes down and they're like,
“a couple of games ago, I couldn't make a shot and I missed every one of them...”
And then I'll ask them, “hey, when was your last shooting hippopotamus?”
And they'll look at me like, “David what are you talking about? You're crazy! What?”
But what I'm doing there is showing them it's just the power in the word.
They have already thought that this word “slump” means something bad,
but it's only if you decide that, you have the power to be able
to change that, just like “failure.” Like most people will say, “hey failure's
bad!” They're scared of failure, some will even say failure's a
way to learn and grow, yeah I agree with that. I think failure's the only way to learn and grow.
So if we can embrace this failure and look at it, what I call being in the pit,
like where you fall down in this pit, this is this failure,
and if you can embrace this and understand this is what's sharpening you,
this is what's making the fire that makes the diamond even shinier,
like this pit that you embrace, this is how you're going to get out of this failure
and come out so much better on the other end. And it's not about, like these failure times,
these difficult situation times, that happen to us,
somebody else along the line is going to go through the same exact thing that we do.
Now, we use this failure, not only for our own growth but also to help others grow as well.
And that's so powerful, just being able to redefine that word of failure.
And even like the word “rich.” I have a chapter in my book called “The
Rich Life” and it goes into depth of like, what really does rich mean?
I mean you can have a lot of money and you can end up being
Steve Jobs and miserable on your death bed. But are you rich in your relationships with
your family, with your kids, with your spouse, that's where you can really pour into
living this rich life and redefining these words that
the world says we have to think they are one way, we can have them in a different way.
And I'm really big on giving people tools, actionable steps on actually how to do things,
cause it's one thing to talk about the purpose and the whys, and that's all great but
there's a big disconnect between actually knowing and doing.
So, I'll take you through the whole hands example and you can put this into play in your life
and this is a tool that we all have. So, we all have our hands with us.
So, first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is you look at your hands
and you see all that they've been through. Do this right now, if you're listening,
look at the calluses, the grooves, everything that you have been through,
you have gotten through, so you're gonna get through the next challenge in time as well.
Now, imagine the most confident person in your life, maybe it's a teacher, a parent, a mentor,
you see everything that they've been through, now your hands are their hands, their hands are
your hands, you can get through it as well. So, you wake up in the morning,
first thing you do look at those hands. You have the confidence, self-awareness hands.
Now, at some point, you're gonna walk past a mirror.
Most often it's early on to brush your teeth or wash your face.
Now this mirror, is what I call the mirror of self-doubt, a foggy mirror.
We all wake up with self-doubt, the impostor syndrome is in us when we wake up.
And we have that choice to live in that
and what the world is telling us that we have to be and the expectations
or we can take our hands, those hands and make the motion of wiping away that foggy mirror.
So, literally, there's the power in actually making this motion,
triggering into our subconscious that, “hey we don't have to live
in this self-doubt that we have, we wipe away this foggy mirror with our hands.”
So, to keep it going with it now, so we have these hands,
we got our confident hands, we got our “wiping away the self-doubt” hands,
now these hands are our service hands too. So every room that you enter,
look at your hands and say the word “serve.” So you know when you step into that room,
it's not about yourself or what others can do for you and you can get out of it,
it's about what you can give, how you can pour into others, how you can serve others.
Honestly, that is the biggest thing. It takes so much pressure off ourselves knowing that
it's not all on us, but it's how we can give and how we can serve.
So, these hands, try that. Like it's really powerful, man.
Try that when you enter a room or when you type an e-mail or write a text,
you can look at your hands and say “serve.” The last part of the hands, the tool
that you always have with you are the encouragement hands.
There's a player in the NBA, Steve Nash, he used to play in the NBA. He's my favourite player.
He would lead the league, lead the NBA in high-fives given.
Take that stat, high-fives given. He gave 239 high-fives a game.
Like literally like encouraging everyone, he's a two time NBA All-star,
he's 6'2, unathletic like myself but he was the best teammate that anybody ever had
because he was always giving high-fives. And we can all do that.
We can be that person who gives high-fives, yeah sure maybe it's Zoom high-fives right now,
but we can always be that person that encourages and looking at your hands,
and maybe it's sending out, I do it every morning,
I send out either three texts or three video messages to someone
that maybe I haven't talked to for a while, just an encouraging note to them.
And, man, you wouldn't believe that the amount of change to trajectory in their life that it's had,
just by that encouraging note, and we can all have that encouragement hands.