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College basketball season is here!

What’s in this newsletter?

• 😨 Why fear keeps many top athletes and leaders from reaching their potential.

• ☑️ How unchecked fear shows up in your performance—and what to do about it.

• 🛠️ Tools and exercises to help you face and manage fear effectively.

• 🪜 Practical steps to “Know Yourself to Lead Yourself” with confidence.

The Idea: Addressing Fear

Note: This newsletter uses examples of athletes, but you could easily replace every use of the word “athlete” with “coach” or “leader.” Think about these ideas in your context.

This is the third Newsletter in our series on Maximizing Performance. In it, we will walk you through our work with our athletes. If you’ve missed either of the first two, check them out.

1. Commitment vs Contentment: What Elite Performance Looks Like (Link)

2. The Framework for Evaluating Performance: How do I know how I’m doing? (Link)

This week, we begin walking through our four-step process where we walk coaches, athletes, and performers through establishing, maintaining, and maximizing a plan for:

1. Fear

2. Purpose

3. Tilt

4. Confidence

So, we begin with fear. Why does it matter for performance? What hard questions must we all face before maximizing our commitment and contentment?

And why do we start here?

Anecdote: Talent that Never Reaches Their Potential

We’ve all heard this sentiment.

“Everyone has the same skill level when you get to that level. It’s the mind and the mental game that sets people apart.”

We can all think of an athlete, a team, a coach, or a program described this way.

Just the past two weeks, I heard the following:

• “They’re always dominant in the regular season but always flame out in the tournament.”

• “They’re the most talented out there but will never win. They’re happy with finishing Top 25. If they get too high, they know they’ll choke under the spotlight.”

• “I know I’ll choke under pressure.”

• “They can’t handle being relied on by their teammates.”

It’s such a common part of the athletic performance conversation that we’ve just accepted many of these sentiments. We talk about players (and coaches) as if they’re immutable. It’s just how they are. They can’t change.

Well, we refuse to believe that. Because it’s not true.

What is true, however, is that most people, even top performers in professional sports, are unwilling to look underneath the surface to examine what’s really going on and to address their fears.

We call it “open heart surgery.” Before you can provide any bandaid, strategy, or actionable takeaway for a performer, you must address the “why” underneath it all.

Research: Why does Fear exist? What is it doing to us?

Fear is a natural thing. It’s our “fight-or-flight” survival mechanism kicking in.

But, when our emotional system becomes overactive, it shuts down our brain functions.

Said differently, we aren’t able to think straight. We can’t make decisions well. We lose our ability to understand what’s important and what’s not.

This is communicated visually with something called the Yerkes-Dodson Law.

The premise is that there is a “zone of optimal performance” where an appropriate amount of stress actually brings out the best in us.

But, you become overly stressed, and your brain will turn on its fight or flight mechanisms. Unfortunately, we’ve seen it up close quite a lot with both coaches and players. Here’s what happens:

• Your mind goes blank

• You miss important information

• You focus on the wrong things that don’t impact performance (refs or a call)

• You fixate on information that isn’t important

• You know what the logical solution is, but your brain feels like it’s in a “fog”

• You default to poor habits that have been developed for years in these situations

But, the reason this kicks in during performance is likely a deeply ingrained fear we believe about ourselves off the field. It’s the insecurity we need to address before we try on-field strategies.

It’s open heart surgery.

Putting it all together:

So, how can we do this for ourselves and begin asking ourselves the hard questions to address fears affecting our performance?

Today, we have two tools and two exercises to show you that we use to help athletes and coaches address these. They come from two tools we’ve written about before.

1. Address your Self-Preservation

   When we start to act out of fear, our defense mechanism kicks in, and it comes from a response to one of these three questions.

As we advocate for in the post linked above, we encourage you to answer the questions first. In general, what are you afraid of losing? What are you trying to hide? What are you trying to prove? And to whom?

These questions help you “hold the magnifying glass” up to yourself to identify when you act out of fear and those bad habits kick in. Where is it coming from inside of you? What is the source of the fear?

2. Take one answer above to take it around the Know Yourself to Lead Yourself tool.

The fear that you wrote — your answer to the question goes to the tool's bottom (Tendencies).

Work around the tool. What is the most common action or pattern of behavior that shows up in your performance as a result of that fear?

What are the consequences of that action on your performance?

What reality does that create for you?

Write those answers down.

Now, go back to the bottom to tendencies. When you feel that fear start to creep in, what is a better pattern of behavior? How can you manage that fear (you will never fully “control” it)?

This is the first step in beginning to address your fear. What have we done in this newsletter?

1. We’ve admitted our fears out loud. The second you “say” them, you can view them more objectively.

2. We’ve examined how those fears impact performance.

3. We’ve devised at least one idea of how to manage it better.

We will remind you what we remind every athlete or coach. This is not a “silver bullet.” It will not happen in one day. Just like open heart surgery, it will take months, maybe even years, of physical therapy.

But, until we address it, no plan of daily discipline and no strategy will ever be fully effective.

Conclusion:

Fear is a natural response, but letting it control your performance isn’t inevitable. You can lead with greater clarity and confidence by identifying and managing the underlying fears that hold you back. Growth starts with honesty; face your fears today to unlock your potential tomorrow.

Team Talks

One of the significant topics coaches ask us about is messaging.

Chances are, if we see a Head Coach’s name pop up on our phone, and they’re in-season, they want to share where their team is in their season and ask how to craft a message to maximize performance.

We know you’re tired of scrolling through YouTube, Instagram, and X (Twitter), looking for a motivational video that you hope and pray will resonate with your team.

We were asked so much that we created a more permanent solution.

And that’s Team Talks.

What are Team Talks?

Team Talks are short, 10-minute-or-less videos to use with your team, focused on mindset, leadership, and performance. They’re evidence-based ideas with stories to capture your team’s heart. Each video comes with an exercise to make the lesson stick. They are used by state, conference, and national champions. We have Team Talks on:

• Adversity

• Accountability

• Teamwork

• Discipline

• Mindset

• Elite Performance

There are currently 18 (the length of a typical season). We will build the library over the next few months to have thirty-six.

Team Talks set you up with the right message at the right time for your team.

And for a limited time, we’re offering them a 25% discount. Get Team Talks today.

The Culture Playbook + Cohorts

Coaches have access to a lot of coaching content. What they lack are systems.

The Culture Playbook is 10 leadership ideas with the exercises you need to install the ideas and culture into your program. It’s the exact system we use to help coaches build their programs around mindset, leadership, and performance. We’ve used it at schools like Oklahoma, Mississippi State, and Florida State.

Since the Culture Playbook was released almost a year ago, nearly 1,000 coaches have purchased and are using it for their programs.

You can get it for your program today.

Culture Playbook Cohorts

We are offering Culture Playbook Cohorts if you’re interested in exploring the Culture Playbook on a deeper level.

We’ve had a few dozen commitments over the last week and aren’t starting with very many cohorts, so reserve your spot today!

Monthly Calls + Powerful Content + Practical Application + Community = Accelerate Your Growth

If interested, simply DM Seth or Kevin on Twitter.