6

The Power of the (Realistic) Positive Mind-set

As I watched Luke Hancock step forward to receive the Most Outstanding Player Award after scoring twenty-two points in the national championship game and I heard the crowd—the largest ever to watch an NCAA championship game—go absolutely crazy, I wanted to laugh. I remembered one of our home crowds giving an exaggerated Bronx cheer after one early-season game when Luke hit a three-pointer, as he’d struggled early while recovering from shoulder surgery. Yet here he was, in that moment, the most celebrated player in the country. He never would have been there without an unflinchingly positive mind-set. There are many examples of the power of positivity in life. Luke Hancock in the Final Four was a living, breathing example.

If you were not around, it is difficult to imagine how difficult a trip that was for Luke. A lot of people in our fan base were down on him early in the season when he was still slowed by the effects of double shoulder surgery. It would’ve been easy for him to become discouraged, to lose faith in himself. He could’ve become frustrated or impatient because the healing process was long and painful. He would show up for practice every day unable to lift his shooting arm above his shoulder. Our trainer, Fred Hina, would slowly stretch him out and put him through a series of exercises, some of them painful, others basic, like throwing baseball passes with a basketball, to get his shoulder into playing shape. And this was a daily thing.

You’d think a kid dealing with discouraged fans and a difficult recovery would, at some point, give in to frustration. Luke never did. “He always showed up ready to work,” Fred told me. “He’s the toughest kid I’ve ever seen. Not many would play through the injury he had. But once he was convinced that his shoulder was getting better, even if it was slow, he came in and did the work with a positive attitude. As long as he did the work and was able to practice every day, he had confidence that his game would come back.”

I don’t know that you will ever witness a more confident player than the young man who made four consecutive three-pointers inside of two minutes with his team trailing by twelve in an NCAA championship game. Yet that’s what Luke Hancock did. An effort like that is not only one for the record books—his five-for-five shooting from three-point range was a championship game record—it’s one that deserves to be studied.

Coming out of a timeout, off an out-of-bounds play we had called in the huddle with 2:59 left in the first half, Luke inbounded to Gorgui Dieng, then took a handoff from the big man just to the right of the key and used him to get a sliver of daylight, knocking down a three to trim our deficit to nine. He hit another with 2:35 left, off virtually the same play, from the same spot, and pulled us within seven. The third was the result of pure point guard play. Peyton Siva ripped down a defensive rebound and dribbled the ball up the court. He saw Hancock trailing the play, moving toward his spot. Then you saw the genius of Siva, who took a couple of bounces in front of Hancock’s spot, inside the three-point line, then turned and flipped the ball back to him, shielding off defenders. This one was three to four feet deeper than Hancock’s first two. He swished it, and the deficit was down to four. His fourth in a row came off an out-of-bounds play following a one-handed offensive rebound by Stephan Van Treese. Hancock got the ball at the top left and tried a ball fake. Michigan’s Caris LeVert didn’t bite. Hancock started to dribble. He pounded the ball and moved toward the spot on the court, just to the right of the key, where he’d made three straight threes. Michigan’s Jordan Morgan flashed out to hedge and bumped Hancock off his path at the top of the key, but then he turned to recover his position back in the lane. As he did, he screened LeVert off for just a brief moment—long enough to let Hancock pull the trigger from his favorite spot.

By that time, the entire Georgia Dome was on its feet. Those fans saw the four straight three-pointers. They didn’t see the hours of work Luke had done rehabilitating his shoulder, the number of threes he’d taken from that spot, and they didn’t see some other things, the confidence he had earned from his teammates because of his positive approach, and his positive influence on their lives. Notice how often teammates looked for him, or set screens to free him for a sliver of daylight to shoot. Everybody talks about Luke’s four straight three-pointers. Fewer people remember Peyton Siva having three assists in ninety seconds. Luke’s final three in that stretch was pure confidence, looking to trigger the offense, then seeing a defensive mistake and firing without hesitation.

Luke’s positive mind-set came as a result of his toughness, his confidence, and his preparation. Those are not words you usually associate with the positive-thinking movement. Positive thinkers are usually identified as feel-good, I’m-okay-you’re-okay pushovers. But in this chapter, we’re going to talk about positive thinking in a whole new way. To start, I want to take you inside a couple of late-game huddles.

The first was at Boston University. It was late in a game that we had to win to make the NCAA Tournament. I got down on one knee and told the team, “Look, I’m going to diagram this play. The jump shot is going to be open, I guarantee it. They’re going to expect Player A to shoot, but he’s the decoy. We’re going to get this wide-open shot. Make the shot, and we go to the tournament. We had this chance last year and we didn’t make it. We can’t let that happen again, where we don’t get to the tournament. We’re going to get a great shot, let’s make it.” Then I gave them the play and sent them out. But there was a problem. I wound up putting so much stress on that shot, and planting that negative memory of failure in their minds, that even though it was wide open, we didn’t make the shot and we didn’t make the tournament.

Fast-forward to another late-game huddle. This was in the midst of the so-called greatest game ever played, with my University of Kentucky team against Duke in the 1993 Elite Eight. The winner would go to the Final Four. I don’t call too many timeouts in late-game situations to diagram plays, but we weren’t prepared for that moment. So we had a huddle. I said, “Look, first thing we’ve got to do is get the ball in bounds, so form our box play. If Sean Woods is not open, we’re going to do such-and-such [we would have run another play]. But if Sean is open, we’re going to get him the ball. Sean, I want you to get the ball and all you need to do is rip it down the middle. John Pelphrey is going to be open here, and we’ll be having a guy coming baseline if we need to rebound. I’m not sure exactly what is going to be open, but you can make that play. You’ll see the play to make.” And before they left the huddle, I said one more thing. “Just do me one favor, guys. When we make the shot, don’t celebrate. We don’t know if they’re going to inbound immediately or what they will run.” Our guys left the huddle, and they made the shot. We didn’t win the game because Christian Laettner made an even more incredible shot, but I had left our guys with a positive image going out onto the court, and they produced a positive result.

There’s a reason there are probably more books on positive thinking than on any other subject in the Self-Help Section. Its power is demonstrated time and again in all our lives. You saw it in those two timeouts, totally opposite, two different ways of approaching a challenge—one by stress and intimidation, one by positive influence. That’s why so many people have so many strategies for getting positive, staying positive, being positive. There are as many different strategies as there are people to employ them.

But in this chapter, I’m going to give you a different key to positive thinking. In fact, let’s look at this language. “Positive thinking” has been a catchphrase for decades, but recently it has come under a much needed critique. Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America showed some pitfalls of a blindly positive outlook. My coaching colleague Bob Knight addressed the subject more colorfully in his book The Power of Negative Thinking. Knight’s point wasn’t that everything needs to be negative, or that negative reinforcement is the only way. His point is that in order to achieve positive results, one must work for them, not hope for them. I certainly agree with that. And during the course of this chapter, you’ll see that borne out. In fact, I don’t even want to use the term “positive thinking.” What I want from my players is a positive mind-set, and I define that as a positive approach based on confidence in one’s ability developed through preparation.

You’ll find no shortage of people telling you how important it is to keep a positive mind-set. I agree with all of them. And you don’t need anyone to tell you the damage that negative people or forces in your life can cause. As I look back, whenever I’ve coached with fear and intimidation, something bad happened. In all the great comebacks my teams have made, including overcoming two twelve-point deficits in the Final Four on our way to the NCAA championship, our Marquette “Miracle on Main” in 2012, our Kentucky “Mardi Gras Miracle” at LSU in 1994, or my 2005 team’s twenty-point comeback to beat West Virginia in the Elite Eight, you name it, all have started with the same message, “We’re going to win this; I see the other team tiring.” The positive approach works, and it is proven time and again in every field. So it’s a given that positive is better than negative.

But the road to positive thinking and living also is more difficult than many people make it out to be. In the 1980s, Al Franken made the character “Stuart Smalley” popular on Saturday Night Live. His character would sit in front of a mirror and repeat the phrase, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggone it, people like me.” Too often, positive thinking in our society is reduced to the way you feel, or to putting on a positive face for the world to see. Too often, “positive thinking” is reduced to a mantra you can recite, or a playlist on your music player that you can use to turn your emotions in a positive direction. It’s a poster you hang in your room or pithy sayings on a calendar. Now, I do believe that what you put into your mind is important. But it is not the ultimate key to developing a positive mind-set. Nor is any amount of hoping, wishing, or wanting a given goal or accomplishment. You can’t will something to happen without working for it to happen. In his book, Bob Knight wrote, “Having the will to win is not enough. Everyone has that. What matters is having the will to prepare to win.”

If you want to be a truly positive person, there is only one key, and that is preparation. That’s the element that is missing from a great deal of the positive thinking discussion today, and it is absolutely the most important step not only toward establishing a positive mind-set, but maintaining it over time in all situations, including when adversity strikes. Today, we hear people talk about “having a bad hair day” or “getting up on the wrong side of the bed.” A positive mind-set has nothing to do with either. The foundation for your positive outlook and approach to life does not happen by accident or luck. Your positive approach to life and work must happen on purpose, through planning and preparation. And once you have done the work you must do to be prepared, then all of these other strategies can have their full impact.

Someone once asked the legendary John Wooden, “How can I become an optimist?” Wooden answered, “Proper preparation and attention to details.” There’s a reason he won more championships than any coach. He knew that preparation was the key. In our program, we base everything on having a realistic positive mind-set and we try to avoid what I call the false positive. Our football coach at Louisville, Charlie Strong, calls it “fake juice.” What we want in our program is the real thing. We don’t want people being unrealistic, but we want their optimism to have a strong foundation on preparation and work. Think back to your school days. If you had been in class all semester, taken good notes, done all the reading, and mastered the material as the professor presented it, then at test time you walked into the classroom with confidence. But if you skipped classes, did only sporadic reading, and finally pulled an all-nighter before the test, trying to cram a semester’s worth of information into your head, no amount of positive thinking was going to help you on that test. You could have all the belief in the world, repeat all the feel-good words in front of the mirror, but those positive feelings, without the proper preparation, would not produce results.

We want a winning mind-set in our program. But we also want our people to understand the difference between being positive and putting on a smiling face. There’s a fine line between being positive and being foolish. If you’re down three with three seconds left, if you’re prepared for that moment, then there’s a very good chance that shot is going to go in. I’ve experienced it. If you’re throwing a party or having a wedding or a business meeting or retreat, if you’re prepared for any scenario, you generally have a great event. But any wedding planner will tell you, if you go into the big day saying, “It’s going to be an awesome wedding,” yet you haven’t considered every scenario and prepared and planned for months, you’re likely walking into a disaster.

Preparation, then, is the fuel that gives the positive mind-set its power. It’s not the smile on your face or waking up in a good mood. I’ve gotten to know New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. He’s not the first person most people would point to if asked to give an example of a positive person in the NFL. But Bill is an extremely positive man, and a big part of that is because he’s so well organized and prepared. Ask people to think of someone positive and they’re most likely to come up with someone who is smiling and laughing, with almost a cheerleader mind-set. They think of the Dick Vitales of the world. They wouldn’t think of a guy like Nick Saban. But again, he’s a guy who is positive with his players, and who infuses his program with the confidence born of great preparation.

Take a look back at Luke Hancock. Everybody on the outside was down on him, but it was because they didn’t see what was happening behind the scenes. Every day, he was putting in the work. And that gave him confidence that he was on the right track, no matter what the results were in a given game, or what people might have said about him. His positive mind-set wasn’t driven by results or outside opinion, but by the actual work he was doing.

So how is all this accomplished? You must start with the understanding that the realistic positive mind-set doesn’t just happen naturally. It is something you must plan for, starting with how you go to bed the night before. You have to be thinking about the next day’s positive mind-set before your head hits the pillow. The one-day contract is a great way to accomplish this. If you sign on for it, you will already have devised your plan for the next day and will have a strategy for moving in the right direction. The mind-set you go to bed with and the mind-set you wake up with are key factors. Your subconscious, while you are sleeping, will take whatever emotions you fell asleep with and run with them. During the season, this is especially important for me. I’ve found that a good book works better than anything. I switch off the news and any other negative influences that may creep in, and read a chapter or two of a worthwhile book on my way to going to sleep. Waking up “on the right side of the bed”? During the five to eight hours you sleep, your mind is going to take care of that. But it starts before you ever fall asleep, with your confidence that the next day you will get up and take care of things. We all know the anxiety and sleeplessness and dread that come with having a task for which we are unprepared looming. If you are unsure what is going to happen the next day, you will not be truly positive in approaching it.

Ken Lolla is our soccer coach at the University of Louisville. He believes so strongly in going to sleep with the right mind-set that when he tells his children bedtime stories, he always plants lessons or messages into the stories. He has developed one such lesson into a successful children’s book using that approach out of his desire to have his kids thinking the right things before they go to sleep, because it will have an effect on how they wake up, and shape the rest of the day.

Scotty Davenport was an assistant of mine at Louisville who went on to win an NCAA Division II national championship at Bellarmine University in Louisville. The night before every road game, at bedtime, Scotty sticks his head into the rooms of his players and tosses a candy bar onto the bed. Around the piece of candy is a note with a short message he wants the players to take into the game the next day. By tossing that candy in at bedtime, he has created a little ritual, and players expect the candy, and that note. But he also wisely plants the seeds of success for the next day with his players at that key moment before they go to bed. With text messaging, our coaching staff will often text players at night to set their mind-set for the next day, or text them in the morning with positive messages.

I have tried, over the years, to develop a positive routine for starting the day. I wake up around 6 or 6:15. I go downstairs and stretch a little bit. At my age it’s a necessity. I do ten to twelve minutes on the elliptical machine. I’m going to do more exercise later—and I’m always building time for exercise into my daily plan—but I need to get my body going in the morning, and this is how I do it, just enough exercise to wake up thoroughly. Then I go upstairs and shower, and head to work. On the way to the office, I do not allow negative influences to creep in. I don’t listen to talk radio. One wrong statement and you can be in a bad mood for hours. Why let that distract you from the job at hand? Often, I’ll call up a good friend and talk for ten or fifteen minutes, anything to hear a positive voice and to get things off to an enjoyable start.

With our staff, we begin the day with a forty-five-minute meeting. Now I have to tell you, I’ve stormed into these meetings before and absolutely ripped everybody. Just ask some of my former assistants. These days, I’m making it my goal to begin those meetings on a positive note. I try to get guys to relax. I’ll get coffee. I’ll get breakfast. It makes a statement to your staff and that sets a tone for the day. Think about this. You plan everything else in your life—your retirement, your vacations, and your holidays. Does it not stand to reason that you have to plan your approach to the day as well? You will quickly learn that everybody around you will feed off your emotions.

And one challenge you will encounter is that it is difficult not to feed off the negative emotions of others. We all know those people. We all encounter them along the line. For you, it may be a boss or coworker who simply drains the energy from the room, or whose constant carping makes it impossible to maintain a positive outlook. But even this you must plan for. You know going in that you cannot fall into that trap of despair. One useful tool is to try to understand how that negative person operates. It helps to try to learn what pressures they are under and to listen to them. You don’t do this to let them influence you, but to try to “scout” what is motivating them or where their unhappiness comes from. In this way, you’ll be less likely to be influenced by their negativity and more likely to view it as just another opponent to defeat during the course of the day. But more than this, it’s important to keep your focus on your own goals and to understand that the reward isn’t always praise from others, but what you are accomplishing with the work itself. If you’re in the midst of a negative work environment, always keep this thought in mind—if someone from your dream job were to call your office that day and ask about you as an employee, what would your superiors and coworkers say? If they have no choice but to report that you are an extremely hard worker who approaches your job with enthusiasm and energy, you are halfway there.

With our team, when we are going through rough stretches, I repeatedly remind them on how they will be judged—and it will not be on their present struggles, but on how they handle those struggles and respond to them, and on how they perform at the end of the season. On the day I began this chapter, we were just days removed from having lost a basketball game when we were ranked No. 1 in the nation. Our senior point guard, Peyton Siva, one of the outstanding players I’ve coached in my career, committed a costly turnover near the end of that game that gave Syracuse a three-point lead in the final minute. I saw Peyton’s head sagging and immediately called him over and grabbed him by the shoulder and said, “Forget about that. We’re still in the game. We can make a three-pointer. We can win this.” The turnover we would have to live with. The negative response we cannot live with. Sometimes it’s not the actions of others that allow negativity to slip into our thinking. Sometimes it’s our own mistakes. But even then we simply have to recognize what is happening, and realize that a negative response is only going to lead to more negative results. Our eyes have to be on the goal. It takes great effort to be positive.

Some people, of course, go the other direction. When they fail or are in the midst of negativity from others, they develop a false opinion of themselves. They take to social media for validation or start to take shortcuts. The work environment is toxic so you start to cut out early or neglect working the extra hours you should be working to get the job done right. In the end, this behavior is self-destructive. Tiger Woods, through his own behavior, derailed perhaps the greatest career in the history of the sport. But his work ethic and positive approach to a negative situation should allow him to make a comeback. Hillary Clinton lost a bitter primary election to Barack Obama. But she remained focused on making a positive contribution, accepted the position of secretary of state, and when she left her cabinet post held the highest approval rating of any national politician. Anytime I find myself drifting into a negative mind-set—and that happens to everyone—I realize that I’m on the road to failure. And more often than not, the way out of that mind-set is to get back to work, to better prepare myself for the situations that led to that negativity in the first place.

We talk about fundamentals a great deal in basketball. The fundamentals of preparation are the building blocks of a positive life. When I have players who haven’t put in the work over the summer to strengthen their fundamentals, working on ball handling or post moves or their shot, they struggle to stay positive when the season begins. Chane Behanan, for example, is a physically very talented basketball player. When we started our shooting drills I noticed he would always get discouraged when the shot wouldn’t go in. I repeatedly would say to him, “How can you get disappointed when you’ve never put in the time and preparation to be a good shooter?” It always befuddles me when I see a player get disappointed by a shot not going in or when he doesn’t execute a move correctly when he never put the time in to master his shot or perfect his moves.

One trap of traditional “positive thinking” is that it sets up false expectations of happiness. I appreciated the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, who became weary of being told to “think positively” about her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. She wrote her book in response to it. She wasn’t railing against attacking your problems or working for positive outcomes, but she was challenging the positive thinking industry, and rejected the notion that her cancer was a “gift” and that she’d be healed if only she stayed positive enough. Sickness and tragedy are not gifts. But my viewpoint of the realistic positive mind-set is that you have two choices, to attack them positively and in the process hope to encounter or become something worthwhile, or retreat into despair and negativity, into a state that benefits no one. I’ve done both in my life. Sometimes you need to go through the stages of both. But the positive mind-set, based on life, and our experience, and our preparation and toughness, bids us to move forward.

There’s one more aspect of the positive mind-set we need to consider, and that is being a positive influence on others. Everyone wants to attach themselves to positive people, and as soon as adversity hits the fan, people want to run the other way. The easiest thing in the world to do is to denigrate others. That takes no talent. There are people in this world who have immense talent, but because they are so critical and negative, people run the other way. You can’t be overly critical in your professional dealings. You can’t be self-serving. Having a positive mind-set is not only about yourself, but also about others around you.

In my profession, negative recruiting is rampant. It’s not enough for some coaches to make their recruiting pitches; some coaches feel the need to put down every other school while they’re doing it. I’ll never forget my greatest lesson in this, which came in 1976. As a matter of fact, that experience is the source of a rule I still have today when I sit down with a recruit and his family. It all started in Nashua, New Hampshire, where I traveled on a recruiting visit for Syracuse. I remember it so well because Jim Boeheim and I have laughed about it so many times over the years. I was recruiting Rich Shrigley, a power forward at six foot seven who had the ability, on a lower scale, to play a lot like Tyler Hansbrough of the Pacers plays today. He was just the type of young man you’d want on your team. Jim hadn’t seen him that much or communicated with him. I said, “Jim, when we go in the home, I’ve got a great relationship with the mom and the young man, let me do most of the talking with this one.” I felt good about our chances. Remember, we were in New Hampshire, not on Tobacco Road, and I knew very well that it was down to North Carolina State and us.

During the course of the conversation with Richard I said, “One thing I’ve noticed about Jim as a head coach is that he has an eight-man rotation, and those guys get most of the minutes. There are some other programs that fill all fifteen scholarships with players who could play at any program, then wind up playing only ten or twelve of them. Take N.C. State. Coach [Norm] Sloan is a great coach, and certainly they have a legendary program. But they have fifteen players who can play, and how do you fit into that program with fifteen guys?” I told him it was just a matter of numbers, and we didn’t have such big numbers and he’d have a better chance to play at Syracuse.

All of a sudden, Rich’s mother, who had been listening very attentively, said, “You know, I told Norman about that, and Norman has too big a roster and we’ve talked about that with Norman.” At some point I stopped her, because she was using the coach’s first name, and I said, “You’re talking as if you really know Coach Sloan.” She smiled and looked me square in the eye and said, “Yes, the reason I talk to him so personally is he’s my brother.” As Jim fell off the couch laughing hysterically, I wanted to crawl underneath it. I realized at that point, although I hadn’t been negative about Coach Sloan or his program, that would be the last time I would mention another school or coach to a recruit. From that point on, all recruiting would be about our program and what we had to offer. And it’s been easy to remember that lesson, because Jim Boeheim never lets me forget, whenever we get together. Negativity can accomplish nothing good. Others can point out playing time or contrast you with a competitor. You would be wise to stay away from it.

Does this mean that as coaches, we never use negative reinforcement with players? Well, all you have to do is watch any coach on the sidelines to realize the answer to that. I will get into a player who is doing wrong. I will get into a player after a mistake, or one who is not responding in the right way on the court. I’m not advocating a life in which everyone is praised all the time, regardless of performance. And I’m not advocating that you live that way. Sometimes your honest opinion is asked of you. My only advice is that in a professional setting, deliver such thoughts constructively. Be a positive force where you are, and let your actions or, if necessary, your criticisms, come out of a team mind-set.

An extreme in behavior made headlines in the coaching profession during the 2013 season. At Rutgers, a young basketball coach was caught on video shouting antihomosexual insults at players, shoving them and throwing basketballs at them. This, of course, is unacceptable behavior. It is over the line, and the coach was removed from his position and is seeking treatment for anger issues. But it is the exception, not the rule. While we get on players in a heated way, especially in the thick of competition, we’re always mindful that the goal is to prod them to do their best. In the national championship game, I was all over Peyton Siva, quite possibly the nicest young man I’ve ever coached. I was prodding him without mercy in the title game, because we needed so much from him. I’d say, “Are you tired? You must be out of shape. You’re really looking gassed.” The truth, and he knew it, and he knew what I was doing, was that he was turning in a performance of athletic endurance that I could never even have dreamed of as an athlete. After the game, and after many such exchanges this season with Peyton and Russ Smith, I made it a point to say to the press that I marveled at what those guys could do physically and the shape they are in.

I’m a coach. It’s not always going to be sunshine. Sometimes, we’re going to deal with negative behavior or negative performance with negative feedback of our own. Sometimes, it’s appropriate to be negative. But the goal, always, is a positive outcome. It is never to hurt someone or to beat them down. The vast majority of coaches understand this. When they get after players, it is to push them to their potential. I’ve gone to bed some nights and actually felt guilty over how hard I got on a kid like Peyton Siva, because he’s not only such a nice person, but he always shows up the next day smiling and back in his positive mind-set. I have great respect for Peyton. I’d feel bad not for things that I said, but that I pushed him so hard. Yet his ability to handle those things and his daily positive mind-set showed what happens when positivity meets toughness. That’s when you get a champion.

So the true keys to the positive mind-set, in reality, have nothing to do with your mood. They have nothing to do with how you feel. A positive mind-set comes out of a deliberate effort. It comes through the preparation to breed confidence in what you’re doing. It comes through planning, whether it’s plotting out your day the night before, or paying attention to how you end the day; it requires your thought and attention. And finally it’s about the projection you make to others, not out of a false sense of superiority or any kind of arrogance, but out of a desire to advance your own strengths and talents, and the unique things that you have to offer the world. There’s nothing easier to find in this day and age than people who are hypercritical, snarky, or just plain mean. Meticulous planning, understanding how to attack your competition, and reaching back and never giving into mental or physical fatigue are the key ingredients that will steer you toward a positive mind-set. With all of that, if failure sets in at any point, you do not deviate from understanding the ultimate goal, and that is reaching the championship level of whatever endeavor you are attacking.