Unlocking Mental Performance in Basketball with Jon Giesbrecht (Part 2)

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Welcome to part 2 of my conversation with John Giesbrecht. On this episode, we elaborate on where we left off from the last episode. So you can check that out if you haven't done so already. And we talk about how coaches can understand mental toughness in sports and things like the process of subbing in and out and some hacks that players can use and coaches can teach their players on how to help them ground themselves when coming out and back into the game again.

John challenges fear and mistakes in performance, as well as advising coaches and players to find their own path, avoiding the Kobe trap, as he calls it. Everyone's journey is unique, and John outlines this in this part 2. So enjoy the episode and let us know what you think by getting in touch on social media.

You can find the links in the show notes. John, you hear, you know, in mic'd up moments in the NBA games, coaches, you know, they say be tough and, you know, other kind of words like that. What does that actually mean? And how can players be quote unquote tough, mentally tough?

I think generally when we think about toughness, it's about gritting our teeth and pushing through. But if I was going to be more specific, what I would call it is resilience. And it's this ability to notice stress as it's building. And then from that place, regulating so that you stay adaptable.

Alex, In Transforming Basketball talks about perception-action coupling. You keep that alive under pressure when you're regulated and you can still explore the affordances, all the opportunities instead of shutting down and being, being totally overwhelmed because there's just, it seems like there's so much coming at you.

So in terms of toughness, what I would say practically what it looks like, if there was something tangible. Toughness can be as simple as every time I sub out of the game, I have a specific routine that I do that helps me discharge and move energy and let go.

One of the things that Kobe did early on in his career, he was studying animals, he was studying sharks, and he was looking to understand how to shut down Allen Iverson, understanding timing, angles. What I've done with our athletes is I'm doing the same.

But we're looking at how animal animals work with stress, you know. So for animals, what they're doing a lot of times is they're, you know, shaking their body like they're doing involuntary shaking to discharge the energy. So if there was an impala being chased by a cheetah in the wild, it's going through a process of going back into hyperarousal, you know, after being stuck and stiff, going into hyperarousal, heart rate's beating really fast.

Shaking its body, looking around, regulating through vision. Am I safe? Can I scan for threats? And then it returns to the wild. So going back to toughness, it's this ability that, okay, I'm going to feel like sometimes there's a cheetah chasing me and, you know, all the expectations, all the pressure, all the messaging, all the information, all this stuff.

There's a buildup. And now I'm realizing it's too much. And I need to move it. So when I get to the bench, I'm jumping up and down, I'm shaking my body, I'm breathing deep, I'm accessing cooling, calming chemicals like dopamine and serotonin because I'm breathing deeper.

And basically the toughness part is just showing up to that moment. I've had so many athletes say, why? I kind of feel like I start to get self-conscious when I get into my routine or the scene. And then all I said to the athletes is just do it bigger, do more.

More movement, more breath, you know, more vision. And that allows you to, you know, start to downregulate. So sometimes you have to meet the energy where it's at. If the game's really intense, I have to go to that place, pull up and slow it down.

So for our athletes, specifically with our professional team, we have a very specific sequence that I teach every athlete on our team, and they may not do it exactly, but as I've said a few times, It's providing the menu. Here are a few things.

When it hits the fan and everything seems to be going wrong, your mind is all busy, you're in fear. What if I miss? You know, what if coach subs me out again? You're caught in that. You're caught in that stuff. Here's something that can be helpful.

You know, the professional sports is awesome because the coverage is so great. So you see, you know, players pregame Well, like how they do pregame, even when they sub in sometimes you can kind of get that. And you see a lot of the best players, the better players, do have things that they do before the game starts.

You know, you have your, I remember D-Wade used to hang on the net and do pull-ups. And, you know, I think Steph Curry sprints to the baseline. So it's like different things that they do to start the game. I'm curious how important that is from your perspective.

When they get subbed back into the game as well.

So as we've said, state shapes perception. So I have a back and forth where, as we said, I go into activation. I have to be able to come back and relax and let go and move on. And then I have to get back into activation.

So let's start here. Let's start with subbing out and then I'll go into subbing in. I'll give you the full thing right now. So what it looks like. Is the first thing, and we're coaching pro athletes on this. This isn't just high school and college, and I do it with high school and college players, but I'm saying even at the pro level, we're doing this.

What happens is athletes are subbing out of the game. The first thing that I'm coaching athletes on is eye contact, being able to look your coach in the eyes and slow down as you're being subbed out, because in that moment, that's an opportunity for co-regulation.

You know, where I'm able to, if I can regulate, I can help my coach regulate. And then he can even be sharper in his delivery instead of getting caught in, you did this, you did that, be better, you know, get, you know, just trying to discipline me or punish me for whatever happened.

So first thing is eye contact and posture, body language. That's something that we coach. And I teach athletes how to feel into that posture by taking them through that, by practicing within workouts. Here's the stoppage. Now we're going to get you sub out and we're going to practice this.

And we do it multiple times. After I make eye contact, I have good posture. I'm able to nod my head. I run down the bench. I'm looking to give high fives, more opportunities to co-regulate. As I'm co-regulating, I can be, you know, using language.

It's really easy to say, hey, we just need one more stop. You know, that's going to help me get out of my head. And get back in my environment, more available to what's happening. So I'm regulating as I'm speaking, as I'm giving high fives.

Once I get to the end of the bench, that's where I can take time and space to move all the stuff, to allow all the stuff to pass through me instead of allowing that pressure and all that stuff to, to just make it stiffer.

I don't know if you've ever seen an athlete freeze up or lock up. That's all that is. It's just all this energy building up, building up. And a lot of that energy in the body goes right up. The mind. So I need to let that energy move through me so my mind stays open and clear and available.

So what we'll say to the athletes is when you get to the end of the bench, you take that time and space, you jump up and down. So I'm jumping up and down, I'm shaking out the body, I'm flicking my fingers, and then I'll come to a stop and I'll just check in with what I'm feeling.

Rating state. Mind is racy. Heart's still beating really fast, body's tightening or tensing up. I'm just recognizing and reading before I get into any further tools, before I get into any, you know, practices to regulate, you know, whether it be breathwork or whatever else.

Then from there, I'll take as much time as I need and I'll see if I can start to focus on my breath and let the air out really slowly. As I let the air out really slowly, what's happening in my physiology Is my diaphragm's unlocking and it's going to help me start to breathe deeper into my lungs.

So I'm using my nose to breathe deeper into my lungs because it's a better breathing mechanism. So if I can breathe deep into my lungs, my body's going to release cooling, calming chemicals like dopamine and serotonin. Have a little bit of breathing. And from that place, we sit down.

And so this is a— I've just described this long process. That is where we start. Once they sit down, then we can do some grounding. You can stomp your feet, walk back and forth, or you can, you can find a posture that's comfortable.

Then you see if you can soften. So I soften my body, I soften my shoulders. And why I'm making this so specific, and I'm giving you this information, is because for my whole life and why I got into this, Is because everybody would tell me to let go, you know, let, let it go, just let it go.

And I'd get more frustrated because I said, I don't know how to do that. My whole life I've been a pretty angry, frustrated person. I don't know how to do that. You know, I'm intense. I don't know how to do that. So, you know, if you're someone like me, you know, you have, you have something, you know, like this is the process.

I learned to soften my shoulders. I learned to let tension melt away. By sitting there and breathing a little bit deeper. And that player will do some vision. As I said, vision is a way to regulate your nervous system.

No, that's super helpful. And now if we fast forward, that player sat down and now coach calls them up. Hey, John, you know, get back in the game. What does that process look like to, you know, get started again?

Yeah. So they get called in, as we said before, now I'm going into activation. So I'm preparing my body. There's 2 things. Once I've shifted down, there's a few things that you can do. The first thing is stay active, stay moving. A lot of our players that had a pretty good sense of readiness and stayed in the place they needed to be in, they found that movement was really good.

So they were on the bike, they were staying, they were on the sideline moving their body, staying in loops instead of just sitting and getting really stiff. But when they do call your name, It's a form of activation to run to the table, you know, run to the table, get your body moving.

Once you get to the bench, jumping up and down, shaking the body, you know, preparing the body to get moving again, to be ready to play with that kind of contact, the speed of the game, use the breath. So I have a whole system in terms of recovery and activation that I teach our athletes.

But one of the things we'll do, we'll we get to the scorer's table and we're not jumping, we're just chill, is we'll get to a powerful breath in through the nose and then we'll blow out some CO2 and then we'll get into letting the air fall out.

Let it come out really slowly. Purse your lips, let it out slowly. And then if they need, they can also practice some box breathing. Just as I'm kneeling down, I can do a little bit of box breathing. Yeah. To find that sweet spot, and then I said one before.

So for us, I think one of the things Alex has done a good job of is playing with different starting points. How many players do you know practice immediately subbing in and then getting into a rep? Like okay, you know I'm going to come off a pick and roll.

You know I'm playing one on one. You know I'm reading the coverage. I'm punishing the coverage. That's all great, but your starting point is, are you actually practicing subbing in? Because so many athletes say, oh, well, I need, you know, a couple minutes on the floor to find my rhythm.

There's truth to that, but you can also work with that when you're practicing.

That's a unique point. It's so interesting. And I spoke to Marianne Davis on the podcast on a previous episode, and it was the whole thing about when a horse has to go to competition and how the horse and its trainers don't know what's going on because they haven't practiced that.

So it's You know, it's a very similar thing, a player in practice subbing into a rep. I love that. I want to ask you about, so you mentioned Kobe Bryant before, you know, his blackout workouts often get referenced a lot by athletes. You know, he had a crazy work ethic, woke up at like 4 o'clock in the morning.

I think it was like by 10 o'clock, he had like 2 workouts done in the day. How do you help players avoid the trap of chasing someone else's blueprint? So that they can find their own. And, you know, and I also want to add, it's not necessarily that this won't work for certain players.

It could very well, but it won't work for every player. It's not the way it was designed, right? It worked for him. That's how he was wired. And I know even in your past experience that we talked to at the beginning of this episode, you know, finding who John is to maximize your potential.

Yeah, I think what athletes do and what coaches do the very best Is as much as there's consistency, you're on a search for truth and you're starting to understand yourself and what you need, what's going to be sustainable, what's going to work for you given your own nervous system, given your own environment and experiment.

And like, if you realize that, hey man, I'm not sleeping, how is this affecting me? And what I love that not a lot of people talk about is how Kobe recognized later in his career how important sleep and meditation. Everybody gets fixated on the Mamba Mentality, the 5:00 AM workouts, you know, the 6 workouts a day or whatever it was.

But Kobe shifted and said, man, that's not for me. I actually need more sleep. I actually need greater recovery if I'm going to play at a high level and be, you know, one of the top players in the NBA. So even Kobe, Recognized that, hey, I need to make a shift.

He wasn't stubborn and stuck on who he had been. He was evolving throughout his career. He was being adaptable to what he was experiencing, the nervous system, his environment, his age, all that stuff came into play.

That's great. And I also want to ask, what are thought patterns that constantly hold players back?

Yeah, I think whether it's conscious or unconscious, it's, you know, don't mess up, don't get subbed. You know, it's A lot of times it gets you playing safe. And as we've said a few times, the fear is going to narrow your perception and it's going to kill your ability to adapt to what's happening.

You know, we want to recognize that fear is coming up to the surface and it's stopping our ability to explore all the affordances, all the stuff, all the opportunities for us to take chances. So if you can recognize fear in your system, what does fear feel like to you?

You know, if you can really articulate it, And communicate it. Oh man, this is what it feels like. At the same time, training your brain to go into fear. And as you go into fear and come out of it, you're training your, your brain to say, I can experience fear and be okay.

And that's going to reinforce your ability to then expand your perception and adapt to what's happening. So there's that part of it. And then the next part of it is What I talk a lot about in Free Your Mind, or the prompts that I use, is starting to reframe mistakes.

Basically, you're wearing a lens and how you see the world, or you're looking through a lens and you can look through it and say, wow, mistakes, you know, that's not good. You know, that's not good for me. Or I can look through this and say, wow, like this is an opportunity for me to actually grow.

And expand my game. And obviously your environment matters. If your coach is saying mistakes are, mistakes are bad, you know, don't make mistakes. And it's very generic and nonspecific, you know, that is going to affect you. Like, that's just part of it. And that's why I think Transforming Basketball is so important because it's speaking to the coaches and then the coaches are working with the players.

I feel like a lot of it as well is like fear of, to your point, like if they're missing shots or if they're, If they're turning the ball over, you know, if they're late on the defensive rotation. And then it's like, what would happen if you actually do miss a shot?

You know, the game goes on, but are you comfortable realizing that and living with that? And then, and I love that you said, it's like, now you can better deal with fear the next time it comes up, right? And it's a process of just getting better every time.

Recognizing it in your body. And also challenging your beliefs, challenging your beliefs regarding fear. What does fear really mean to me? And being honest about it in the beginning, it might mean fear's bad. You know, every time I experience fear, I think something else is going to happen that's bad.

The cognitive cycles. So once I can feel, once I can challenge my beliefs, and then the third thing, again, what I think Transforming Basketball does such a good job with is having a practice design where I feel fear. You will see her in my training.

Wow. Maybe not as much as the game because the game is a game and there's all these other constraints that are in play that are tough, totally represented in a practice. That's where I'm coming to this, this whole work with is I'm being a little bit more intentional.

This is what I'm experiencing now. How do I work with it? Instead of what most people do is they suppress it. They push it down, try to say it's not there. And then guess what? When the game happens, Bro, it comes at you just like a boomerang.

It comes right back just as fast, just as intense. And now, now I'm really in it. You know, that's—

That's a great example. Great metaphor. How do you define playing free, both on the court and in life?

Yeah, I think playing free is trusting yourself. It's being in the present moment. It's accepting what is, you know, being open. Not second-guessing. And it gives you freedom within the constraints. You're open to the affordances instead of fearing them. If I have space and I'm going to shoot the ball, I have, I can shoot the ball.

I'm stepping into it with confidence and being decisive in those moments because the more I can be open, solutions are going to, they're going to emerge naturally.

From what I'm hearing you say, correct me if I'm wrong, it's like being Content with the fact that I made the right decision, even if the outcome isn't what I wanted.

Yeah, that's a good definition. I'll take it.

Yeah.

Love it. John, before I stop, because I know we went through a lot, but maybe there's something on your mind because I know you're— maybe you have some— because I know the subbing in and subbing out one was excellent. So I don't know if you have anything else.

I think that's pretty good. I appreciate you like running it back a second time.

No, I appreciate your time.

Yeah.

Thank you.

You know, I'm always open to do another, you know, have another conversation or go deeper with certain things. But I think that gives people a pretty good introduction to some of the work that I'm doing. And I also really appreciate, George, the awareness that you're giving people regarding my book, right?

Like mentioning that multiple times, something that I've worked my whole life on in different ways. And I think it's going to give people a pretty good foundation. To explore these things and feel empowered.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about the work that we do, head to transformingbball.com to access our free resources and spread these ideas throughout the basketball world. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform.

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