Slappin’ Glass is joined this week by author and performance consultant for some of the best coaches in the NBA and NCAA, Bob Levant. In this highly insightful conversation the trio dive into Bob’s thoughts on building emotional IQ, the role of fear in coaching and leadership, responding vs. reacting, and discusses “dripping” culture daily to your team and sticking to the process during the always fun “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”
Transcript
Bob Levant 00:00
As a human superpower, and the seeds of victory are always found in defeat. And slowing down enough to be responsive to the skid, right? We want to end the skid, but we also want to be even better on the other side of the skid than we were before it. And so to me, what I do is have conversations like that so we can have the meeting, we can find solutions to make our process better, but we can do it in a way that we’re even more powerful on the other side, and that our players understand that.
That it’s not just, whoo, man, glad that skid’s over, right? That the players are able to identify the power and resilience and how to respond.
Dan 00:47
I’m Dan Krikorian and welcome to Slapping Glass, exploring basketball’s best ideas, strategies, and coaches from around the world. Today, we’re excited to welcome author and performance consultant for some of the NBA and college basketball’s top coaches, Bob Levant. Bob is here today to discuss building emotional IQ, the difference between responding and reacting, fear and coaching, and we talk dripping culture daily and the hardest parts of being consistent during the always fun start, sub, or sit.
Bob, I wanted to start broadly with just asking you the question because you work with and consult with coaches and teams in the NBA and in college basketball, Fortune 500 companies. What it is that you do and what it is that you help with from your side of things, help with coaches or help with leaders in general.
Bob Levant 02:38
That’s a really great place to jump off. I and the folks at my company create a framework. I create a framework and a context for competitive people, people that are operating really at the tip of the spear to understand what’s happening to them. What I mean by that is when we talk about emotional intelligence, I think of it as we all have an operating system that runs 24-7 in the background of our being, our minds, our soul, and who we are. Often times, we don’t really pay attention to it, or we react to it rather than respond.
So what I do is I create a context and a framework. If you think of highly competitive athletes constantly, whether it’s on the floor, whether it’s external things like social media, friends, family, pressures, all of the things that come along at the highest level, whether it be the NBA, collegiate athletics, which has obviously become much more of a pressure cooker over the last bunch of years with NIL and other things. I create a context and a framework for competitive folks to understand what’s actually happening, and slow the process down enough to be able to figure out how it is impacting them, and then make choices about how to respond as opposed to simply reacting. That is from a high level, what I do is create that context, and I refer to it as the science of greatness. So I think of all of this as like a science, an inexact one, of course, because it’s human driven, but it is the science of greatness, right? It is, sports is a great petri dish for life, and learning to be a better and more powerful human, and so at the end of the day, if you ask me in five seconds on an elevator, I’d say I teach the science of greatness.
Dan 04:20
I’d love to start with asking you to maybe go deeper on the difference between responding and reacting and what goes into that minor or major difference.
Bob Levant 04:29
You know, we could go all day. that. That is really the foundational part of being a powerful person with an EQ that is really, really high. So it all starts with self-awareness. When I think of the science of greatness, there’s a foundation to it. I think of it in kind of a pyramid shape, right? And the very top of your pyramid is I would call true self-confidence or we might call flow or in the zone on the floor. And there are all these things that go into being able to get there. Some athletes do it more naturally than others. Some love to think about it and study it. But at the end of the day, it all starts with a foundation of self-awareness.
And so to your question of responding versus reacting, when you think of the everyday pressure, which in some way always come back to fear, you know, am I going to perform well enough? Am I going to make the shot? What is Twitter verse going to say? Or my own people or coaches, etc cetera. You feel yourself and want to react to that, right? Want to try to force a result. And what we actually want to do is be responsive. And that can happen in a millisecond. It’s just the understanding that our buttons are getting pushed. And the more high pressure the situation, whether it be in sports or in life, the more the button is getting pushed to react. And the more high stakes the decision, the more important it is that we respond to whether that’s a huge free throw or a life-changing decision in somebody’s career or marital status or whatever the case might be. Responding is always the way.
Pat 05:56
Bob, just stick on this responding versus reacting. When you’re working with coaches, with the coaches you work with, what are the commonalities that you see where it’s shifting from reacting to responding when looking at a coach and when helping a coach?
Bob Levant 06:11
put it in context, a three-game losing skit. The coach is feeling pressure to stop the skid, and so there may be a tendency to say, let’s have a meeting and make changes. So a meeting may be really, really important.
Whether or not changes are needed and where and how those tweaks get made, obviously, we want to be responsive to what is actually underneath the three-game skid as opposed to reactive to just trying to change it. Then the other thing that happens is in an example like this, you then begin to develop the power to be able to coach something like resilience to your players. Because resilience is a human superpower, and the seeds of victory are always found in defeat, and slowing down enough to be responsive to the skid. We want to end the skit, but we also want to be even better on the other side of the skid than we were before it. To me, what I do is I have conversations like that, so we can have the meeting, we can find solutions to make our process better, but we can do it in a way that we’re even more powerful on the other side, and that our players understand that.
That it’s not just, man, glad that skit’s over, that the players are able to identify the power and resilience and how to respond versus react, because that’s ultimately what we want them to do in game situation. In the bigger the situation, the more we want them to be responsive, and this becomes a way of being in a team or in a company or even in a family. You do this and you rip it, and we’ll talk about how you can do that, but it becomes a way of being.
Dan 07:49
Well, if I could follow up on the connection between resilience and emotional intelligence and some of the work that you do to help coaches understand, first of all, maybe what emotional intelligence is and then why it’s so important for coaches, people, players to be aware of their emotions and how that then connects to being resilient at the end, hopefully.
Bob Levant 08:12
So emotional intelligence is developing a greater and greater awareness of what causes us to do things and act and react in certain situations. And when you talk about resilience, you can draw a direct line to fear, right? And so what holds folks back from the other side of resilience is not always wanting to walk through doing the hard things because we all as humans will shy away from the hard things.
And the best way through the hard things is to develop the muscle memory to know that the more frequently we do them, so that can be physical, it can be mental, it can be emotional, the more we walk through them, the more both powerful we become on the other side, and the more habitual it becomes to do things that are really hard, and then we seek out harder things. And so for an athlete at the highest level, at the professional level, this may have to do with things that have to do with training and making really hard decisions with body, diet, rest, distractions. It can have to do with things in their personal life that need attended to to feel like, well, I’m not going to deal with that, I’m gonna just focus on the basketball and working through those hard things in every aspect of our life is what creates the superpower on the other side of resilience.
Dan 09:35
Bob, if I could follow up on, I guess it would be getting towards like a framework or setting up systems or structures that these things can start to be built. So like, if you have a player that’s showing problems with being resilient or whatever it is, what happens next?
Is it a head coach that talks to them? Is it just work on the floor? Is it personal meetings? I mean, what’s a way that coaches start to try to dig into this stuff with their players and team?
Bob Levant 10:03
Yes. So let’s put it in even greater context, thinking about somebody who maybe the shots are not falling or there’s something inside of their process of the jump shot that needs work, but it’s easier to just do it the way they’ve been doing. You know, if you put it in context, right? You have somebody who, if they take the time to change something about their game, there’ll be better on the other side, but the way they’ve been doing it has gotten them to a division one program or the NBA or wherever they are. And so they may not want to work through that.
Where I think it kicks in for a coach to work with a player like that is to literally help the player understand why they don’t want to do the work. At the end of the day, it’s the player’s choice, whether they want to do the work or don’t want to do the work, but calling a player out to say that what worked to get you here, isn’t necessarily the thing that’s always going to work, but it habitually feels good because it’s comfortable and it’s what’s gotten us here and the higher the level of play, the more likely somebody defaults to the comfort things that got them there. But at the end of the day, squeezing out greatness gets harder and harder, right? The better you get, the more difficult it gets to squeeze out greatness. And the reason for that is that we default to comfort because it has been working. And so you create that context and there are tools and things to have conversations and drip content, right? To literally provide content to players through short videos, through meditations, through discussions that help them to contextualize it. And so in real time, that is what it looks like.
Dan 11:30
If I follow up on natural versus learned emotional intelligence and how much of it is natural people that have it versus how much can you learn.
Bob Levant 11:40
love all of the questions could like do this all day and this is the madness and also the joy of it is that you have to know who your athletes are you have to know who your team is whether it’s in order in life because not everybody is going to help their needs the same thing and not everyone is operating from the same level of emotional intelligence and just like you know god-given athletic skills some of us get a little more natural feel for this than others so put it in time right so look at two of the greats of all time i would say if you look at Michael Jordan unbelievably emotional intelligent to be jordan right and to do what he did to motivate his teammates in the way that he did it and to motivate himself but he did it innately rawly he did it by showing up and being jordan with this deep perhaps the deepest desire of all time to really not lose and the fear that came along with the thought of not being the greatest all the time and that drove him to do things that that was the glue of the bulls now of course phil jackson was also about this stuff and is about all this but you look at the late Kobe Bryant and you watch videos of interviews with Kobe he’ll talk about this all day kobe had a deep deep deep appreciation and interest in the science of greatness that we’re talking about and then in between you have every athlete is somewhere in the middle there and helping to understand that everybody comes at it from a different place in terms of how innately they do it and how they tap into it
Pat 13:08
Bob, I’d like to kind of switch gears a little bit or jump to consistency. And it’s something we had talked about prior to our recording today. But I mean, I’m sure you see it at all levels, but especially when you’re not dealing at the pinnacle of high performance coaches, you know, whether it’s developing young players, college, high school players, where players are struggling to be consistent in their habits and their work ethic. And I guess how you would help coaches work with players that are struggling with consistency and understanding again, I guess, like the triggers, what really goes into inconsistency.
Bob Levant 13:38
Consistency is, in my estimation, the hardest ingredient in greatness. It is very tricky in every aspect of life. Taking it into the realm that, like you said, real life or the college game, the younger we are, the more difficult sometimes it is. And consistency is extraordinarily hard because we don’t realize how intentional we have to be to be consistent.
So there’s this kind of loose discussion about habits, right? But if you want to have championship habits, that is not actually habitual for an incredibly long time, if ever. Championship habits are intentional. You have to get up every day and say, what do I need to do today to be a little better than I was yesterday and to make sure that my foundation stays the same? So the answer to your question is explaining this to athletes. And so let’s look at the college game for a second. In this day and age with the portal and the NIL stuff going on, the ability for a young athlete to say, man, this is just like too hard. This isn’t a good fit for me. I’m going to find a better fit for me. That is at a level that is an all-time high, inviting young athletes to move away from the intentionality that’s required in being consistent. So the opportunity there is for coaches to explain. When I work with college coaches, this is a big part of the conversation. Most of these college athletes are probably going to play their last game as college athletes. And so helping them to see the enormous power in becoming intentional about our habits and making choices about how we want to show up, enormous opportunity. And I think there’s a great opportunity for programs to build a culture where parents and kids alike are like, oh, it’s even more important that my athlete be at a place like this. Because at so many places, that’s not getting instilled and there’s kind of a revolving door or an invitation. And so the answer to the question is that people don’t realize how intentional you have to be to be consistent. And it’s hard work and it’s tiring and it’s worth it.
Pat 15:49
Maybe shining the light on your work with coaches where do you see me coaches drop the ball and are consistent enough themselves.
Bob Levant 15:57
You got to embody it. So when you think about the responsive versus reactive, there’s a place coaches can be really intentional because throughout the course of practice, a game, a season, a recruiting year, or a year in the NBA, there are endless invitations to be reactive and coaches are going to fall prey to that sometimes.
The ability to teach in real time, the power of responsiveness, you know, is always there. And so embodying it. And I also look at it like this, you know, there can be two frameworks in a program. There’s the basketball framework, which I always say is above my pay grade, I don’t do the basketball framework. And then there’s the culture framework, which is what we’re really talking about. And it is all day, every day in little ways. And so to your point, you’re on the practice for stopping play to explain a fundamental principle of emotional intelligence, and how a coach may or may not have been able to do it better or differently, to me is as important as the basketball framework, because if you get them both, right, then you have something to stand upon that lasts for as long as you want it to and as long as you invest in it.
Bob Levant 17:01
I’d love to circle back a little bit to fear and you talked about it being at the base of a lot of this stuff and sticking with the coaches now and there’s overarching fears of you know career stuff but there’s also just like in-game fear of losing the game or mistakes or all that. So there’s sort of like things are happening in real time fears and there’s you know long term fears as the results and I guess how you work with coaches and leaders on handling both types of those fears and like what the process is to you’re not gonna probably get rid of it but just work with it.
Bob Levant 17:35
I was talking about fear. My favorite quote of all time on fear, Ralph Waldo Emerson, what we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. And so the types of fears you identify, they’re connected, right? Because if you lose the game and then you lose two or seven or whatever, then you’re worried about your reputation, your job, your livelihood, the next job, all the things. And so the reality is that, as you pointed out, this is a place where you can really embody for players because their fears are the same. If I miss the shot, we might lose the game. I might lose my playing time. Somebody else is going to get my spot. All of the things, you know, what are people going to say? So the players are experiencing the same thing as the coaches.
And so this is a great place to embody it. The answer is that fear is the ultimate invitation. And so what’s on the other side of leaning into fear is freedom. And so if a coach acknowledges the other side of fear, I’ll say it one more time, is freedom. And so if a coach acknowledges the things you just said, and I know like coaches know at all, I got to win, you know, it’s win or get fired. But I mean, really acknowledging how much this can impact their decision making and their way of being and recognizing that that is not going to serve them. What’s going to serve them is knowing that the best place they can be is whatever happens on the other side, they were responsive, that they understood what the fears and the pressures were, and they were able to operate at their very best within that. And that is true of every team and every athlete who’s ever taken the floor or the field.
Pat 20:15
Bob, when looking at freedom, I know within your science of greatness, you also have a part of letting go, and I’m assuming it’s probably a conversation about control, but again, framing it through a coach, when you refer to letting go, what are you trying to help coaches understand that they should let go to gain this freedom?
Bob Levant 20:31
To the original question that Dan tossed out, ultimately, it’s the result. So if you want to really simplify what letting go is, and letting go is over and over when I talk to people like all of us, type A, go-getter, overachievers, letting go is always the hardest work.
So I’ll often say, I’ll always be a recovering control freak forever. That’s everybody who’s ever coached. You’re paid to actually control. That’s part of what you’re trying to do, and then you got to let go. So it’s the result. And any time you are focused on the result in any way, which is where fear takes us. Am I going to win the game? Am I going to win enough games? Am I going to have my job? Any time the fear takes you outside of being deeply embedded in your process, it’s taking you to a result. That is a reminder and an invitation to double back down on your process and to be OK that that fear is there and say, well, that’s a reminder that I’ll say this often to coaches. Every day, every practice, every game, every film session, you have a bucket of energy. We each have a bucket of energy in a day or inside of an event. And where we put that energy, it doesn’t refill. So if we lose energy to a fear, to a worry about a result, maybe before the game’s even started, sitting in our office or on the sideline before intros, we’re letting energy go out of our bucket that is better harnessed and put into our process.
Dan 21:57
Bob within all of the fear talk, you mentioned the base of the pyramid was self-awareness. What type of work do you do with coaches to help with their own self-awareness?
Bob Levant 22:10
Thats a great question and one of these things i refer to a simply complex self awareness is simply complex yeah i just gotta pay attention to like you know what’s going on i’ll be self aware of all good right, it is like the essence of this idea of simple complex so i wrote a book called finding polaris no plug just sharing it cuz i’m gonna tell you it’s called intentional living for extraordinary life. Chapter one is of course about self awareness as the foundation starts there the title of the chapter is ignorance is not bliss.
Self-awareness requires us to look at things that are uncomfortable and habitual and frankly we rather not have to change so an example where i recently had a conversation with the coach. Where i said have you ever paid attention to how much time you spend handling. Worrying about what if this happens or what if that happen and we had this great conversation about yeah me and every other coach you know that’s ever walked the planet spends a lot of our time handling. There is an example with increasing self-awareness you’re still gonna ring your hand right you’re still gonna worry. What the more you notice that that’s the energy going out right that’s the energy going somewhere that is just not gonna have a payback and so then what am i hand ringing about and what can i do in this moment and oftentimes it’s nothing. Because i’m not going to spend energy on something that i’m not sure is gonna give me value. I’m not really sure yet how to approach that player about this right it’s the hand ringing that would have us do it anyway. And so then the energy goes there and then we don’t get a dividend in real time that’s what it looks like at its rudimentary level how much attention my willing to pay to what is driving me and the wise behind what i’m doing.
Pat 23:49
Well, if I can just follow up, I think he gave a great example of if you have a player and you don’t quite know in that moment how to assess the situation, deal with or talk to the player, what would be your advice for the next step for the coach and what kind of timeframe does maybe that coach have to address that player and that issue if there’s a mistake or something that needs to be addressed within the culture?
Bob Levant 24:09
I love doing this, you may be coaching a player right now that pops in your mind. Man, I’ve, you know, saw that five different times in the last practice or game, and so having a, what can be a really short conversation sometimes with a colleague, you know, whether it’s with Dan, somebody like me, and maybe a couple of texts, it is literally presencing what you just said and being thoughtful about it, and we’re not going to get it right every time, but it bears an example of how we become responsive as opposed to react like right there in real time.
And the timeline depends on, you know, what the issue is, who the player is, you don’t know how much time and bandwidth do you think you have in your season, right? How important is this player to you? Like that’s where the basketball part fits in, you know, above my pay grade, but this is where the two things fit together. This is really where they come together. Okay. Like that player is critically important and playing well, they could just play better, right, or do this better. So the risk benefit is different than another player. And this is again, where this decision, whether to exercise the energy, you know, I’m going to wait until I have a little better feel on that because, you know, things are good. Yeah. I need that to get fixed for us to be at our best for sure. But if I break it, and now I’m two steps back. And so in real time, this is what it looks like. And we just have a conversation about it, you know, it takes two minutes and you do that over and over and you do it with your assistant and your assistants do it and your players do it with each other. And this is what happens over a course of time is that it invites players to talk about things that ordinarily they wouldn’t talk about, right? It creates an environment. And I especially see this with young people in college. We’re like, Oh wow, it’s okay. Right. It’s okay for me to sit around and talk about, you know, how much I sucked in the last two games or what I want to do about it. That’s a healthy environment.
Dan 25:51
This has been great so far. Thanks for all your thoughts there.
We actually want to transition now to a segment on the show. We call start, sub, or sit. We’re going to give you three options around a topic, ask you to start one of them, sub one of them and sit one of them. And then we will discuss from there. So Bob, if you’re all set, we’ll dive into this first one. Let’s roll. Okay. We have loosely discussed some of these things in this first one, but this is going to be three different ways that you can build or drip things in culturally daily. So the first option for dripping culture in is your pre and post practice talks. Whether you circle up, talk to your team, whatever it is, whatever you’re saying in those pre or post practice things. The second option is just on the court, how you actually teach, how you put together drills, whatever it is that you do on the court is the second option. And option three is off the court stuff that you do with your team. Meditation, stretching, yoga, team activities, whatever it is that a coach might do off the court as well. So start, sub, sit, dripping in culture daily.
Bob Levant 26:57
Three good ones. I’m going to start how you’re doing the drills and the on-court stuff.
I’m going to sub the off-court tools, meditations, and things, and I’m going to sit, pre- and post practice and talks.
Speaker 2 27:10
Okay, let’s start with your sub, which is the off the court stuff and some of the work that you’ve seen great cultures do off the court.
Speaker 1 27:19
I love the off-the-court stuff. There’s many universes where that starts, and we’ll talk in a minute about why I didn’t start that. Let me answer your question directly first. The off-the-court stuff, what I love about it is, you have control over it. So it’s a controlled environment. You get to choose what to do, when, and how, which of course on the court in game you don’t.
Tools that I love, meditations, which for me are not about convincing a team to all sit around and hold hands in the lotus position or become big meditators or have pillows at home or any of that. In real-time, meditations, when done, what I believe to be properly, the way that we do them is that they are all teaching tools of a emotional intelligence principle. There is a story to it or a teaching to it without giving away all of the trade secrets or dive in too deep, where you are really getting a lesson in self-awareness, in resilience, in letting go, and it’s built around the meditation. Of course, you’re getting a tool that you can use, in game, to just reset. Using your breath is incredibly powerful. What I hear from players and coaches is that they really appreciate how they get to use this stuff off the floor too, which benefits them as players, because the more they grow and mature, the better they are.
A short quote, a message, that allows for a little bit of discussion. It can be 30 seconds, 60 seconds. Putting a quote up on a screen before a film session, where you ask for a little feedback once the team gets comfortable with it, bonds the team, it puts you in a position to talk about the things that we’re talking about right here, and is really powerful in an ongoing conversation. So I love all the off-the-board stuff, and there are tons of tools that coaches can use where it’s gotta be dripped. We’re in a society where we’re not gonna sit players down and lecture them all the time on emotional intelligence and why they should meditate. So it’s the ultimate putting the sugar flavor on top of the yucky medicine to get it started.
Dan 29:11
You mentioned discussing why you then started beyond the courts teaching first in this
Speaker 1 29:18
Because I think you got to embody emotional intelligence. You have to embody a culture of real growth and true leadership. And there are so many ways to do that in the course of a practice or a game, that that is the place. And ultimately, the more present we as coaches become, the more present our players and team become, the more they’re able to do the things innately, the more they’re able to be responsive than reactive. So I don’t think there’s ever anything more important than embodying what you’re teaching. That’s why I started.
Pat 29:50
Bob, the three scenarios we gave you, they were on the head ways to drip culture. But also, what other ways can coaches think about maybe subliminally dripping culture? So it’s not like, yeah, hey, we’re going to do a breathing session or we’re going to have a pre-practice talk. But I guess other ways that coaches can drip the culture without being so on the head about it.
Bob Levant 30:11
One way is how you show up at the facility after a terrible loss the day before. Show up resilient. You need to show up present for the next thing you got to do. You don’t have to say anything about it, right? It’s a way of being. There’s something that can be done that no one even has to look at and say, oh, what’s Cody? What are you writing on the board? You know, what does she write on the board? Just show up after like the worst game the team has played that season and show your resilience that, you know, here’s what I want to learn from that game. There’s an example. I’m a big believer, you know, a quote on a whiteboard that you don’t say anything about is also really powerful. Sometimes less is more depending upon the level you’re coaching at the age of the players. I love books, you know, leave them around the facility or, you know, share with the players one you read recently, a documentary, a movie poem, you know, just creating a culture where it’s okay to talk about all this stuff. Hey man, I saw this documentary on whatever it was mindset or, you know, a profile of this incredible leader. And just share it and don’t be attached to whether or not your players watch it. Just like the result always pulls you away from your process. Let go in almost all these areas of the attachment to whether you’re going to bring about change. So one thing I say all the time is personal transformation, team transformation, culture transformation. It is imperceptible in real time. We see it later. So let go of worrying about the impact it’s having and just do it.
Pat 31:34
Just looking at your sit, the pre and post practice, I know these are all important, so we’ve made you rank it, but what advice were you think maybe coaches can go a little wrong or stray away from the impact that a pre and post practice can have on your culture?
Bob Levant 31:50
The reason I sat it is because innately, by definition, the players are unlikely to be fully present there. So if it’s pre-practice, they’re maybe thinking about what’s gonna happen on the practice floor, what they need to do. And then post-practice or post-game, they are not present. They’re either thinking about what happened in the game or practice, or they’re thinking about where they’re going next. And so because of the circumstances of it, you just have to go into it knowing that you probably don’t have full presence when you’re speaking, and that’s why. And anecdotally, both my sons competed through school, high school, college, and I would often look, particularly back in the junior high and the high school days, at the 15-minute post-game discussion with a bunch of 15-year-olds, and just think to myself, Charlie Brown’s teacher started talking about 14 minutes and 45 seconds into it, and that’s who’s been talking for the duration. So that’s why I sat in.
Pat 33:22
All right, Bob, our next start subset has to do with now we’d like to kind of drill in on the process. We phrased it as when maintaining the process is the hardest for coaches. So when maintaining the process, the hardest option one after failure, option two after success or during plateaus or periods of stagnation.
Bob Levant 33:48
I’m going to, in terms of when it’s hardest to stay embedded in their process, I’m going to have to start after failure, sub after success, and I’ll sit plateau.
Pat 33:59
Bob I’d like to actually follow up on your sit. A moment ago, you talked about coaches have to let go of the attachment that, whether they’re doing meditation or their talks are going to actually yield instant results. Now, when we’re looking at like a stereotype plateau, where maybe you don’t really see or notice the change, how are you helping coaches understand in these periods, if it did or did not have a success, if it is or is not working? What should coaches be their barometer? When the outcomes are a little blurry, we know after a win or after a loss, you have that result to maybe, and maybe sometimes it can be false, but it’s giving you some sort of feedback.
Bob Levant 34:40
What I heard you asking is, when is it most challenging to stay in your process? We’ll talk plateau. The reason failures at the top, of course, is a direct line to fear, which we’ll come back and talk to. Then success right underneath that is the other side of the coin.
Plateau, and to your question about how does a coach decide this is the right process, that this is what I want to continue doing. Some of that is trust in self. Some of it is on the emotional intelligence side, the more you do this, the more it becomes part of your culture, the better feel you get just like on the basketball side. What does my team need right now to understand what’s happening to it? It’s the very same thing. On the basketball side, you would ask yourself, where am I in the season? I’m in this plateau here. I’m not sure that we’re on the exact right road to maximize our talent. How many games do I have left in the season? What parts do I have to work with, and where do we need to get better, and how urgent is it? On the emotional intelligence side, the same thing. If it’s a particular player that you see so much potential and there’s been this long plateau, it becomes the same sort of dialogue. How do I shake things up? What can I do differently here? What’s my runway? What’s my risk-benefit analysis, just like it would look like on the basketball? When you’re in a plateau, there’s less immediate invitation for reactivity, which is what can create potentially the power or being a little less challenging, which is why I sat back. Because our nervous system, you can just feel it from us talking about it. Your nervous system is running different than immediately after a loss or a big win.
Pat 36:19
Makes sense. Moving to your start, which was then after failure. And you mentioned that that can lead to fear.
What kind of check-in should coaches be doing in moments of failure to understand, like we talked about earlier, stick with the process versus, okay, maybe actually we need to change the process.
Bob Levant 36:37
This is why self-awareness is the foundation it is the initially the recognition how much you hate losing depending upon the loss how much it hurt how much of a predicament it may have left you in right it’s gonna change based on you know whether or not you’re in the middle of a seven game series or whether you’re in a regular season game. What is the acknowledgement that if we react too quickly to fear we almost always miss some opportunity.
Now again that slow down time you know it can be seconds it can be overnight it can be longer than that it can be anything in between. What when we react to the terrible loss you know when we storm in the locker room if we didn’t storm in the locker room because we decided to do it then we didn’t storm into the locker room with the right intention and i am an advocate of sometimes need to storm into the locker room. But i’m also an advocate of making an intentional response decision to do so.
Dan 37:34
When do you feel like you just mentioned going at them in the locker room or making those things known? When does it work versus when it doesn’t work in your opinion?
Bob Levant 37:45
It starts with knowing your team and embodying, right? So if you believe that your team has more grit and more fight in it and more determination and isn’t tapping into it, sometimes we got to show them how to tap into sometimes embodying that is how we do it is obviously a measurement of your team and honest assessment.
I tell players and coaches all the time, honest self-assessment is really difficult for all of us, you know, think of your own life, it’s hard to honestly assess ourselves. So doing that honest assessment and then knowing the why underneath it. And so there’s an example of if I look at a team, you know, I know that this dog has more fight in it and it just can’t figure out how to get the fight out. Let me show them what this feels like to me because, you know, my name and face is on that L we just took and being mediocre when we should be good or good when we should be great. And so you lead that way.
Pat 38:44
Bob on that note, it is a profession where the results matter and when you’re in this area of failure and as a coach, job preservation starts to come into play. Is that really looking at the process more than that becomes a function of the basketball process that needs to maybe be the change or are there something within the culture process that can maybe aid when it comes to job preservation at that moment in time and periods of failure?
Bob Levant 39:11
What’s the best way to save your job, right? Is to change the result.
What’s the best way to change the result? It’s to be as thoughtful and intentional about what the problem is and what the solution might be. And so, you know, I have this thing, all of the things can be true. It is a result-driven business from the stats to the wins and losses, all of it. And acknowledging that, I think, is what allows a coach or a staff to sit down and have the honest dialogue about what is really gonna fix this. And also an honest dialogue about what’s our runway, right? So maybe it is a coach or a staff that’s on the hot seat. And I’m all about raw and honest dialogue. So the fix that you need there may be a little different than what it’s gonna look like long-term. So I’m all about it, right? If you’re on the hot seat, you gotta own that you’re on the hot seat because otherwise the fear is driving the decision. And so I’m all about reality. This is not fanciful at all. You know, if your job’s online, your job’s online, you know, just like all of us, we show up to do a job. So it’s acknowledging that and figuring out what is it that is success, right? So start at the result and reverse engineer. Yes, you gotta get more a win. And then acknowledge the fear and all of the reactivity toward it. And then reverse engineer what we need to do in our process. And that is, you know, again, simply complex, right? This is not easy stuff because we just wanna get the next win, right? In this case, you know, or a couple of wins so we don’t get fired like in your extreme, but very real life example. And the way to get at the process is to take ownership of it.
Dan 40:47
You mentioned earlier about a bucket of energy that a coach has every day. And when it comes to consistency and staying with the process, I’d imagine the best leaders fill their bucket daily so that they can stay consistent, and habits or things that you see those best leaders do that helps refill their own personal buckets so they can be consistent for their team.
Bob Levant 41:09
Great question. Disciplining structure in your own life and how you feed your mind, body, soul, and spirit. You know, my kid’s old tease me about, you know, the predictability of from what I eat to when I eat it or what my daily schedule is. And, you know, I’m also flexible and not maniacal about it and I travel a lot for work, but our daily habits that really allow us, cause that’s the thing that allows us to do this, right? To be responsive, to invest in the process is ourselves not being up and down. So what each person’s own personal regimen is, is them, but being thoughtful and intentional about my personal regimen, especially in season and go all the time, but especially in season, right? Cause your adrenaline’s up and down all of it, right? So having something that you can really return to that grounds you and there can be lots of tools. There can be your diet. It can be, can be a little meditation, be reading, you know, exercise, whatever your thing, drawing, painting, you know, all of it, taking a walk, but doing it regularly and having a regimen.
Dan 42:10
But well said, you’re off to start Super Sit Hot Seat. Thanks for playing that game with us.
We’ve got a final question for you to close the show, but before we do, thank you very much for making the time today and going through all this stuff with us. We had a blast, so thanks for coming on.
Bob Levant 42:22
That was tons of fun man. I love you guys show what you do. It’s applicable, you know, inside of the game and also out every episode that y’all do is stuff that I take from your coaches and others you have on and take it off the court as well. So thanks to you guys for what you do. And for all the people and coaches that take time to come on here. It’s just a great, incredible community y’all have built.
Speaker 2 42:42
Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Bob, our final question that we asked the guests and every show is, what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career?
Bob Levant 42:52
Making friends with fear, normalizing fear, weaning into fear. All of my fears is what has unlocked all of the magic that’s come into my life, for sure. And is the essence of what I really try to teach and share on some level, in some way. All these challenges can be traced back to that. So invest in being a friend, not a foe to fear.
Dan 43:19
All right, Pat, sometimes these conversations give us new life as coaches, I think, especially like right now, we’re reporting mid-season and, you know, like having someone come in that’s not talking X’s and O’s as much and coming in and talking about culture and fear and emotional intelligence and all the things that, you know, are hard during the season, was a breath of fresh air for us. So it was a great conversation today.
Pat 43:43
To your point, yeah, like a fresh perspective, kind of shaking things up for our own minds, like you said, as we move through our seasons. With our team, give us something to think about as we definitely, I mean, that we’ll discuss now in the recap and then kind of leave in here and go into the gym in a couple hours.
Dan 43:59
Yeah, hopefully. without fear.
Pat 44:04
All right let’s kick it off we’ll begin with number one but we’ll do our top three takeaways as usually the order as it follows so i’ll throw it to you with the first take away of our conversation with bob today.
Dan 44:16
So a ton of stuff in that first bucket, I think I’m gonna do like a 1A and 1B. Two things there was the whole conversation around fear and how it drives us to act a certain way and then which leads to 1B, which is the conversation around being responsive versus reactive.
And I just thought great thoughts throughout and a great way to, I guess, start to think about how we react to things or respond to things and what’s underneath it all. And he spoke well about the base of his triangle, which was self-awareness and being self-aware, leaning into the fear. He had the great Ralph Waldo Emerson quote in there about what we fear most is what we need to do. And I think that that’s something that’s, it’s a challenge for us daily as coaches to like lean into the fear, to look in the mirror at the uglier parts of our team, ourselves, how we react to stuff. And I think he talked well about how that is what we need most and to lean into that. And that helps us be ultimately more responsive than just reactive. And I think we get ourselves in trouble. Sometimes as coaches when we’re just reactive, anger, fear, whatever it is, you name all the gamut of emotions we go through daily and try to be more intentional, responsive. So I really liked just all that he said within that.
Pat 45:40
Yeah, I think he spoke really well. I mean, when you look at being introspective and understanding what triggers you as a coach or then ultimately also helping your players understand what’s triggering them. And I think what he does well is, of course, getting to that baseline understanding, but then how bridging the gap to now executing your culture. And like he talked about when we got into being able to respond and building in these guardrails to or the framework. So the culture can then fuel winning when you merge it then with your basketball culture, as he mentioned. But yeah, ultimately is just I think he does a fantastic job or with these high performers type A’s of like, all right, what triggers you and why maybe you’ve built habits a certain way, as he mentioned, that basically help protect you against fear and like kind of breaking down those barriers to get to the root of things.
Dan 46:31
The other point that I like that he made that I think about a lot is that when we talked about resilience and the connection between emotional intelligence, dealing with fear, and then its connection to resilience and ultimately creating a culture, creating players, and you yourself as a coach, being able to respond to failure, to hard times. I mean, it’s like kind of the name of the game, right? And so I think what he’s saying underneath all of this is being self-aware, being able to look fear in the eye, all that kind of stuff, ultimately that helps us get through the tough times, which I think is the mark of great cultures and the pinnacle of great performers. I mean, it’s really easy to coach and play when you’re shooting the heck out of the ball and you’re winning by 25 or 30. It’s like, you know?
Pat 47:23
Yeah, that’s easy. I agree. I think the more we have these conversations and the more we talk to coaches, I’m kind of of the mind that the resiliency and the adaptability, you know, that you can install on your team may play more of a role in winning than any sort of like tactical and probably is, I mean, than any sort of like how great tactically your team is. Because I think we all throughout a game, throughout a course of a season, you know, hit with these challenges, hit with uncertain situations, stuff that you just can’t predict, you can’t script. And the more you have in place to, you know, build resilient teams, build adaptability, you know, I think contribute more to your teams being able to bounce back after failure or fight through any sort of stagnation and drive winning far more than being like tacticians and, you know, tactically sound out there.
Dan 48:14
Yeah, except for what’s on SGPlus, of course. That stuff works.
Pat 48:18
Well yeah I mean that’s kind of the winning formula so copy paste that.
Dan 48:22
Yeah, but I agree with you. I think that maybe just to bring in another point that Bob mentioned, we had the two frameworks, the cultural framework and the basketball framework. And in the hard times, the cultural framework gets you through that much more than a tweak or variation on your offense. When you’re on a skid or players are having a hard time getting along, name the millions of things that have happened during the season, a slight adjustment to your offense or defense might help some things, but ultimately like the great teams, they have the culture stuff figured out because they could just bounce back.
Pat 48:55
Yeah, and I mean, it goes without saying like they’re all important, but I think those are like the true tests of a team of a team’s greatness is being able to resilient bounce back solve situations that yeah, you can’t always script out or necessarily prepare for as best we tried to 100%.
Dan 49:13
Pat, let’s move to takeaway number two and for that I’ll kick it back to you.
Pat 49:19
My second takeaway or point number two was your start, sub, sit question on dripping culture. My takeaway was, of course, the value of the off the court stuff and how coaches can just think about delivering their message, dripping their culture. I did like to, we were trying to figure out a start, subset question for maybe like some subliminal ways to drip culture. I love the examples he gave on just showing up with energy and ready to work after a bad loss or yeah, just recommending books. I think it is a very delicate balance that he hit on with the athlete today, like how over the head you hit them with culture. And I think that’s why this dripping is super important. Just like he said, maybe these mindfulness practices or these dialogues are 30 seconds, 60 seconds. And I think too, that’s why I was curious to get into the conversation of just some, yeah, other ways, some sneaky ways to get that culture into these guys without just them kind of eye rolling and saying like, here we go again. And I think my last point, I’ll kick it to you. Then it kind of flipped too to why he maybe sat the pre-practice or post-practice just like at that point, guys are ready to go. You don’t have a captivated audience and nor do you have much time to really get into it because yeah, they’re gonna, like you said, check out after like 15 seconds of a 15 minute speech.
Dan 50:41
Yeah, for sure. We had a great conversation last summer-ish with now Loyola Maryland Head Coach Josh Loeffler on rebuilding culture, because he had done it different places and then was taking over a new job and just like what’s important and what’s hard to like transfer over. And Josh talked about like, it’s ultimately about the work. Ultimately about like what you do daily and you know, is it a big speech here or there? Maybe, yeah, like those things can be important too, but like, it’s what you do daily. It’s how you teach, all the stuff that Bob mentioned as well, it comes down to like, yeah, you’re dripping in and everything you’re doing.
Pat 51:22
All right, Dan, keeping it moving. I’ll throw it to you then for the last point in bringing us home.
Speaker 2 51:26
Yeah, so I’ll just go to the consistency piece of sticking to the process. What I actually really liked was the very end, we kind of connected the bucket of energy and what you have as a coach yourself and what were some of the habits that coaches have to then be able to be consistent themselves after failure, success during plateaus, you name it. And I liked how he kind of mentioned some of the habits and the routines and things that great leaders have across the board. So they can then bring that into whatever it is that they need to each day, and then I’ll quickly also say, I thought interesting part, what you brought up was just during the plateaus and getting through that portion of a season or a career or whatever it is, and trying to remain consistent when you’re not really seeing a result, good or bad, either way can sometimes be a weird middle ground for players and coaches and teams and to stay consistent through that I think is really hard. It’s harder than probably it sounds.
Pat 52:27
Yeah, I think you and me both are really interested in these plateau situation, scenarios, how we had a good conversation a couple of years ago now with Coach Beckner, looking at it from the, you know, skill development, player development, when players plateau, when you’re in these areas, these gray areas, and you look at like our team, are we really growing or are we getting better? And how you kind of analyze your processes, I think is an interesting conversation and I think basically what it comes down to and you know, what we talked about in our last point, you have these conversations, as he mentioned, you know, you really just continue to keep asking like the whys, why are we doing this?
Is it working? Why, why, why to get stripped down what you believe in and what you don’t and if you believe in and then you just keep moving forward and you hope it’s gonna flip? I thought in the start subset on the daily drip of culture, he talked about the letting go aspect. I think it comes really important, maybe these plateaus are evaluating your process and not having knee-jerk reactions, that you got to let go, that you’re not gonna see the results instantly, like just because you do one meditation session, you know, everyone’s gonna come out there enlightened. You got to get rid of that mindset that it has like instant results, of course it’s a process as we’re talking but it comes with time. I thought a great metaphor he kept referencing was you got to understand your runway, how much runway you have in reference to the time that you have to commit to these things and work with these things versus when we got into the example of a coach on the hot seat and you know your runway is very small then it’s understanding okay well what things need to be changed, what things need to say the same and how much time do they require if I need to change them, you know, to really start to evaluate what you can do to try to move the needle in areas of failure. Absolutely.
Pat 54:11
Alright Dan, so as we close out here, just want to throw it one more time to you, is there any misses or anything you wish we hit on a little bit deeper with Bob today?
Dan 54:20
So there was a portion of the conversation we were talking about dealing with players when they are maybe having issues with either their emotional IQ or going through a tough time and the little conversations that you have with them and how you approach them and talk to them and just kind of like continue the conversations and dealing with things head on. One of the things I wish I would have asked him was how to make that conversation better?
Because sometimes you get home from a game and you think about something and you’re like, okay, I’m gonna talk to that player tomorrow and you think you got in your head the thing you’re gonna say and then all of a sudden you get to the court and you get in front of the player or you pull them aside and then it’s, oh man, what do I say here? To actually communicate what at 11 p.m. the night before I was so easily communicating in my own head. Now you have a vulnerable player right in front of you right before practice and like how to make those conversations better whether it’s starting with questions, how you ease into a difficult conversation I guess is what I’m getting at. It’s not always easy. It’s easy to say, yeah, you should go talk to that player and you should have the conversation and you should have a part conversation. Yeah, I think we all get that. That’s not actually that easy when you get right in front of that 17, 18, 19, 20 year old whatever it is and that person’s vulnerable, that person’s just trying to get to practice and get their jumper up and you’re trying to talk about something. I wish I would have went and asked him about that because I think that that’s something I personally am always trying to get better at and I think coaches think about a lot too.
Pat 55:49
Yeah. I think that’s a great example you give.
And, you know, in our conversation, I know Bob mentioned that sometimes doing nothing in the moment can yield the best results. And to your example, they’re like, I think as coaches, it’s definitely, we can identify the problems, you know, so if there’s a mistake or I don’t know, you’re seeing something with this player, but the solution is not always so easy. And if we’re so eager to like immediately address it and we as coaches may not actually have the tools at that moment to really address it and come up with a solution. So I think it’s like twofold, like understanding in that moment, maybe you have to let it go. And to then your credit to think about it, talk with your staff or with others to, you know, provide yourself with the tools, arm yourself to go into that conversation. It’s the delicate dance,
Dan 56:33
As coach sometimes it’s like a time thing right yeah you play the night before and you get in and you got to meet with your staff and you got to watch film and then you get ready for practice and you’re trying to get into practice i don’t know 10-15 minutes before the guys are on the court shooting the guy you want to talk to shooting with two of his buddies and you want to like go over there and like hey yeah
Pat 56:52
Like pull him aside in front of his buddies.
Dan 56:54
Right. Sometimes it’s like just that is hard too of, you know, already calling in your office before and it feels a little more. I think finding ways to have those conversations is like you just mentioned, a delicate dance and art of how you actually get to a player. So Pat, to finish, I’ll turn to you. Anything you wish we went a little deeper on.
Pat 57:13
You know, I did wish we went deeper on, I followed up in the first bucket about consistency. I think that’s always really interesting when you look at high performers within the high performance category, you know, the elite players that can really perform consistently versus ones that struggle or up and down.
And then when you, of course, go to lower levels, teaching, you know, young kids or young men, just the struggles with consistency and what goes into it and how you can help build more consistent players.
Speaker 2 57:40
Yeah, I think that’s like a whole podcast itself on just consistency in all facets of the game. And I think the thing is hard for me as a coach with consistency. It’s like when you have a talented player that’s not consistent, how do you get them closer to it? Because the talent’s there, they could be great, but there’s things that they’re not consistent at and like ways to work towards it.
Pat 58:00
And my last thought, I think that’s why I really liked his bucket analogy and your follow-up at the end of the pod, just on how coaches can refill their bucket. And now when you look at a player, like how can we help a player refill their bucket or educate them to refill their bucket with when it looks at, yeah, just bringing energy, bringing the consistency of your work ethic.
I think what makes the player side touch more interesting is that obviously then there’s the physical side to it as well. They’re practicing, performing daily that also goes into that bucket and has to be accounted for. But maybe that was another miss, like how we can think about refilling players’ buckets as well so that they’re consistent just in their effort, energy, attitude every day.
Dan 58:42
Well, once again, we thank Bob for coming on and give such a great interview. Thank you everybody for listening and we’ll see you next time