Raise Your Game: Modeling Top Performers Like Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant, And Lebron James with Alan Stein, Jr. [Podcast 221]

 

What would it be worth if you had the ability to understand what high performers and high achievers do differently than what you’ve been trained to do?

In this episode, our guest expert is Alan Stein, Jr. He is a coach, speaker, and author with expertise in improving organizational performance, cohesion, and accountability. He’s spent over fifteen years working with and around some of the top basketball players, athletes, and business people in the world. Some of these have included NBA superstars, Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant, and more.

Alan now travels the world teaching organizations and business owners like you how to raise your game and utilize these strategies in business.

Don’t miss out on this episode!

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Raise Your Game: Modeling Top Performers Like Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant, And Lebron James with Alan Stein, Jr. [Podcast 221]

Let me ask you something, “What would it be worth if you had the ability to understand what high performers, high achievers and the world-class elite performers in the world, what they do differently than maybe what you and I had been trained to do? Would it make a difference for you in your business, in your life and in your relationships?” If you’re an athlete, would that make a difference? We have a unique expert. His name is Alan Stein, Jr. He’s a coach, a speaker and an author with an expertise in improving organizational performance, cohesion, unity and accountability. He’s spent several years working with the highest performing basketball players in the world, including NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Kobe Bryant. He now travels the world coaching, teaching and training organizations like you, your team or your company on how to utilize the same strategies in business that elite athletes use to perform at this high achieving level. Alan, welcome to the show. How are you?

I am fantastic. I’m super pumped to be here and looking forward to our conversation.

You have many unique stories and all of these great things. I’m looking forward to diving in. If you never want to miss an episode, you can go to GrowthToFreedom.com/subscribe. We have over 200 hours now of insights, wisdom and strategies to help you build and grow your business and create better opportunity to make a bigger impact, reach and contribution. You have such a fascinating background. We’re with these high achieving athletes. You’re sought after around the world to teach on these things. Why are you doing what you’re doing now?

Basketball was my first identifiable passion. It’s the first thing I remember truly falling in love with. I was probably five or six years old when that happened. Basketball is still a major staple in my life. Going on a few decades, having been involved with the game, I enjoyed and loved it as a player. When it was time for me to hang up the sneakers, I enjoyed moving into the role as a performance coach. I’ve always viewed basketball as simply the platform for doing bigger things. Basketball’s always been the vehicle and I’m thankful to have a career combining something I love, something I was good at and staying in that sweet spot. Even though I made the leap a couple of years ago to do more work off the court, and in boardrooms, on stages and working with businesses, I’m still telling stories and teaching lessons from what I learned from basketball’s highest performing players and coaches. It’s still a part of what I do and I’m thankful for that.

We’ve got to thank our buddy, Dr. Jeremy Weisz, was how we got a chance to connect. With all of these fascinating stories, before we get into some of the big breakthroughs and a lot of the insights you’ve gotten with working with high achievers, talking about your bestselling book that’s called High-Performance Secrets from the Best of the Best. I want to have you take us back on this journey you’ve been on. Can you think back to a time when things weren’t working, your biggest mistake or your biggest failure? Give some context of where you came from in dealing with failure and what you learned from it that maybe we could learn through your eyes and through your experience?

 

I could do probably three to four books with nothing but my list of failures, boneheaded mistakes and missteps. What’s neat is my relationship with the word failure has changed over the course of my life. When I was younger, I was programmed and taught to avoid it at all costs that you don’t fail. You don’t get bad grades. You avoid failure at all costs and it’s taken some internal work to shift my mind around the fact that failure’s part of the process. That as long as you’re giving the best effort, you have high focus and you’re trying to do your best, inevitably you’re going to fail, you’re going to face adversity and you’re going to have challenges. It’s how you deal with those that determine whether or not you move forward towards progress, happiness and success or you allow those things to make you regress and take a step back.

It’s funny how I don’t even look at failure as failure. I’m a professional speaker. I’m trying to speak on a lot of different stages, and I get told no a lot and I’m okay with that. I’ve built up some grit and some perseverance where I don’t look at those things as failures. I simply look at them as not a good fit. I wasn’t a good fit to speak at this event. I don’t take it personally, I brush it off and I move on to the next play. Whereas many years ago, that probably would have damaged my self-esteem and my confidence. I would’ve pouted about it and made excuses. My overall relationship with failure has changed and this new perspective certainly has led to a higher level of happiness that is without question led to a higher level of performance.

One of the examples I would always use in basketball would be if you’re going to do a ball handling workout and you go do that for 30 minutes, and you never lose the ball, you didn’t get any better. You did what you are currently capable of doing. You didn’t try to exceed what you are currently capable of doing. If you’re going to do basketball or a shooting or a ball handling workout, you should be pushing yourself to the point of failure. You should be pushing yourself hard that you lose the ball that you turn it over or you miss a shot and you grow from there. Failure should not be something that’s feared or resisted. It should be something that’s embraced and welcomed.

In your book or some of your resources, there’s a quote that I grabbed that I love the content. I’d like you to build on this, “It’s a mistake around focusing on the outcome and not the process.” Speak to that and tie that in a little bit.

If I had to narrow down the biggest difference between the 23-year old Alan and the 43-year old Alan, it would be the way that I view process versus outcome. We do live in an incredibly outcome-based society. We want to know who won and who lost. If you’re in sales, you’ve got quotas, and you’ve got goals, companies have numbers and there’s nothing wrong with having those outcomes. Those are the North Star, but you only achieve those outcomes if you create a systematic process to get there. The easiest thing to do would say, “I’ve got a goal of achieving such and such a year from now.” That’s nice. If I want to write that or make a vision board and put that in my room, help yourself and knock yourself out. The most important question I can ask myself every single morning that I wake up is, “What can I do now that will get me a little bit closer to that goal?” That’s all that matters. It’s the process. What can I do now that will put me in a slightly better position to achieve that goal? If you wake up every day, you answered that question and you do it so you can check it off your list, you’re going to greatly increase your chance of reaching that goal.

Listening is a basic fundamental skill that has a lot of utility but is incredibly valuable for someone that's trying to improve sales. - Alan Stein, Jr. Click To Tweet

It’s living in the process. If we use the analogy of a brick wall, don’t focus on the wall. Focus on laying one perfect brick with caring precision at a time. You can deduce that if you lay each brick perfectly, eventually, it’s going to turn into a sound and sturdy wall. There’s not much else that’s possible. Most people get frazzled, enamored and intoxicated off of what the finished product’s going to be, that they’re not laying each brick with precision and care. Ultimately, they’re laying sloppy bricks. If you’re laying sloppy bricks, there’s no way conceivable that you could have a sound and sturdy wall. The gold and the juice are always in the process.

Speaking of the juice of being in the process, as you are reading this, do you want to build this metaphor of your sturdy wall? Having greater growth, impact, reach and contribution? Do you want to build something with precision and care? We’re going to take a deeper dive into some of the top high performing strategies that Alan has discovered on this journey working with world-class executives, leaders and athletes like Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Kyrie Irving and the list goes on and on. What do you find are some of the most common traits of high performers, high achievers, world-class executives, leaders and athletes?

My publisher never wants me to disparage the subtitle of the book, which is High-Performance Secrets from the Best of the Best, but I’ll be the first to tell you in full transparency, they’re not any secrets. I say that because I know the sexiness will draw people in and get them to read the book. I believe in the content so much that I was fine with doing that. Once you peel back the layers and see what high performers do, they’re not doing much that all of us don’t know that we’re supposed to do. One thing I’ve learned, there’s something in all of our lives, and it’s called a performance gap. It’s the gap between what we know we’re supposed to do and what we actually do. High performers have found ways to narrow that gap. They do the things they know they’re supposed to do.

One of the foundational principles of the book and of my life is never getting bored with the basics. Whatever we’re talking about, we can be talking about basketball or we could be talking about sales. There are basic fundamental principles at which the whole house is built and you can’t abandon those. You don’t ever arrive at those. You can’t stick your flag in the ground and say, “I’m done with the fundamentals now. It’s time to graduate and only do the advanced stuff.” The best of the best never get bored with them. In basketball, there are basic offensive moves, shooting form, footwork and the best players in the world, no matter how good they are or how long they’ve been good, still work on that stuff.

The best leaders I’ve been around, the best entrepreneurs, the best sales professionals, it’s the same thing. I was taught at an early age too that when it comes to selling, whether it’s a service, a product, an idea or a belief that telling is not selling. You need to be a world-class listener if you want to be able to sell something. Listening is a basic fundamental skill that has a lot of utility but is incredibly valuable for someone that’s trying to improve sales. My question to anyone that’s a sales professional, “How often are you working on that fundamental? How often are you sharpening the sword of your ability to actively listen and mine for the gold from your prospect so that you can solve their problem?” That’s the same as Kobe Bryant getting up early in the morning to go work on his footwork. He knows that it’s that important and that he needs to do all of those things in order to do the more advanced stuff at a high level.

You take me back to an early training I had as a kid and I think of the John Wooden Pyramid. John Wooden was famous. He would have athletes who were adults, between eighteen and twenty-something, come into the gym. Every year, the first couple of practices, he would go through fundamentals of how to put socks on properly so you didn’t get blisters, how to tie your shoes properly so it reduced your potential for injury in your ankles, your feet, your heels and your toes. All these little things that we take for granted that it’s easy to bypass but professionals spend that extra time. World-class high performers take that extra time. It’s this view of when no one is looking. You’ve got something like that built in your book.

We call it the unseen hours.

How important are unseen hours? Where do you see that most people make their biggest mistakes in the business of not putting in that extra work with those unseen hours?

One thing I want to touch on because I love that you brought up that John Wooden story. It’s powerful for a couple of reasons. One, it’s powerful because there’s truth behind it. Remember when John Wooden was coaching, basketball players were wearing Chuck Taylors. Those barely qualify as a shoe. As you can appreciate from experience, you had a much higher chance of getting a blister wearing Chuck Taylors than you do wearing some of the properly researched and built shoes there are now. Part of it, truly there was functionality to it that if you don’t put your socks and shoes on right, you will get blisters on your feet. If you have blisters on your feet, then you can’t play the game of basketball. This goes back to process versus outcome.

If your goal is to be the best basketball player possible, then you better take care of your wheels because those things are important. I’m going to show you how to do that. On a micro level, that was incredibly important. On the macro level, he was planting the seed that none of this is beneath any of us, that every little detail matters. You are a McDonald’s all-American, you’re coming here to UCLA, you’re going to be a college all-American and a future NBA player, yet putting on your socks and tying your shoes the right way is something I’m going to teach you. It also leveled the playing field and set the tone that we’re all students, we’re all going to learn to do things properly, and all of the little things make a big difference over time. I love that Coach Wooden would do that.

Being coachable means taking your confidence and blending it with humility so that you're coachable. - Alan Stein, Jr. Click To Tweet

To your original question about the unseen hours, I don’t know what the exact percentage is. It is in the majority of our happiness, our success, our fulfillment and our significance come from what we do during the unseen hours. That’s when no one else is watching. In basketball vernacular, that’s when the lights are off, the cameras are off and the cheerleaders stop dancing. What you do then to work on your game will determine how well you do when the lights come on and the referee blows the whistle. If we were to turn on a game, if you and I were sitting around watching a game, the Warriors are on. You and I watched Steph Curry go off for 47 and he drains ten threes, that’d be a spectacular performance, but that performance would have been earned during the unseen hours. That kid has made millions and millions of shots in empty gyms before he’s able to make shots in front of millions of people. We have to make sure we pay homage and respect to what we do during the unseen hours.

As you know, the championships, the records and the breakthroughs happen when no one’s watching. It’s built in the off-season and most people don’t build in their practice time or their off-season in business. What do you see are the biggest mistakes that many leaders, executives, entrepreneurs and business owners make as it relates to putting in the time or not putting in the time as far as building or growing their business?

For many, it comes from a lack of self-awareness. Self-awareness needs to be the foundation of everything because only with heightened self-awareness do we know what we need to be working on in order to maximize those unseen hours. Self-awareness is the perfect storm of a lot of things. It’s the perfect storm of knowing what we’re good at, what we enjoy and what we’re passionate about. It also knows what we are fearful of, what are our insecurities, what are our shortcomings, what potentially could be our blind spots. Self-awareness is also being able to have alignment between how you view yourself and how the rest of the world views you. I’ll keep using listening as an example because it’s a powerful one. If I think I’m a good listener, but you go and ask the five people that know me the best, they’ll all say, “No, Alan’s an awful listener,” there’s a disconnect there.

I don’t view myself the same way others view me. That would mean I probably have low self-awareness. As comical as it would be, I would have higher self-awareness if I said, “I’m an awful listener,” and trust me these five people will all agree with me. There needs to be some harmony between how you view yourself and how others view you. That’s a classic case of narcissism. Narcissists view themselves as these amazing, elite, I’m-better-than-everyone and that’s not how the rest of the world sees them. Part of that is the turn-off from arrogance. Generally speaking, part of the issue with narcissism is low self-awareness. Self-awareness is the only way that you can maximize all of this. The funny part about self-awareness is you never arrive at it.

It’s a continual process. You can’t ever say, “I’m fully self-aware. The game’s over,” then you’ll no longer be aware. It’s similar to fitness. I can get myself in good shape, but then I have to keep working out and eating right in order to stay there. If I stop doing all those things, then I’ll no longer be in good shape. If you do the internal work to heighten self-awareness, now you’ve got to keep it going and it’s something that you’ve got to work on. From a self-awareness standpoint, let’s say, getting angry. That’s an emotion most people can relate to whether it’s someone cutting you off in traffic, your kid’s acting up or a co-worker acts inappropriately. Most people can say, “I’m angry now.” They get that. That’s a base level.

 

The next step would be able to say, “Why am I angry?” I found that it’s rarely what’s right in front of you. If my kid misbehaves and I get irritated, it’s usually not from their misbehavior. There’s something deeper, something well below the surface that’s causing me to have that outburst at that time. The third and highest level is being able to be a spectator to your own thoughts and emotions. Be able to step out and go, “Let me take a breath. I’m angry. I’m going to figure out why I’m angry and I’m going to figure out the best way to process that emotion so that I don’t lash out, I don’t hurt anybody or I don’t do anything I’m going to regret.”

I’m going to have some compassion and say, “It’s okay to be angry. I don’t need to suppress it but how can I best use this anger or best process it so that I move forward instead of making a mistake and move back?” I had an entire perfect storm of all of the stuff I mentioned is heightened self-awareness. It’s the number one skill any entrepreneur, any sales professional, any person on the planet regardless of vocation needs to have high self-awareness if they want to perform at their highest level.

Do you want to perform at your highest level? Here’s a quick check in on a scale of one to ten, ten being greatest. How would you rate your self-awareness? If you don’t have harmony in your self-awareness, of how you see yourself versus how others see yourself, there’s something you can do about it. Once you can understand where you’re at on the self-awareness chart, then you can start to take the next steps of getting your next big breakthrough. We talked about narcissism and we talked about self-awareness. I don’t know if this is true or not, we haven’t talked about it. I’m fascinated by the thought of this or the inkling of it. What is the correlation between high performers and being hard on themselves as it relates to self-awareness?

Many high performers are their biggest critics and they hold themselves to an incredibly high standard. In fact, most of them hold themselves to a standard higher than anybody else could ever hold them to, and in many regards are a perfectionist when it comes to that thing. I’ve learned that these high performers, they do a brilliant job of mixing confidence, which comes to the self-belief from a demonstrated performance. They’ve put in the work during the unseen hours to master their craft and they know they deserve to be successful. They deserve to perform at a high level, but they blend that with humility so they don’t have an air of entitlement. They don’t have that arrogance or narcissism. They don’t believe that they should be handed a championship because they’ve put in the work. They have the humility to realize that one, they still have more to learn. Two, they can still grow and get better. Three, there are other people as accomplished as them out there that are competing against them trying to win that championship, win that sales call or what have you.

That’s what being coachable means. It’s taking your confidence but blending it with humility so that you’re coachable. With all of that stuff, when you have high confidence with humility, then you can offer yourself some grace and some compassion when you don’t measure up. You’re able to move on to that next play. One of the most brilliant examples of that is with Tom Brady. They came up a little bit short against the Eagles. He wasn’t able to come through the way that he felt he could have. I know that stung with him. A year later, they’re hoisting a trophy up above their head again. It’s able to learn from every piece of adversity and move on. That is one pitfall and it’s insightful you brought that up. Folks can end up being critical on themselves that they never progress and move forward. They’re constantly chopping themselves off at the knees and that’s a big mistake. You have to give yourself the grace and compassion that you would more than likely offer a loved one or a friend.

Folks can end up being so critical on themselves that they never actually progress and move forward. - Alan Stein, Jr. Click To Tweet

In all this work you’ve done, you’ve worked with thousands of athletes, hundreds, maybe thousands of companies and thousands of business owners over the years. What would you say in the last handful of months as things are progressing with innovation and technology, all of this fascinating stuff that’s in front of us? What are one to three breakthroughs or discoveries? What advice would you give our audience for them to tune in to be on the path to being a high performer, high achiever, world-class performer in business?

First is to embrace change. Don’t run from it. Don’t resist it. Change is inevitable. Without sounding overly dramatic, portions of the world have changed since you and I started this conversation. That’s how fast the world moves, especially now with technology. Instead of trying to resist change, which is what most people do because change makes most people uncomfortable and gives most people anxiety, we need to embrace it. We need to realize that change is a prerequisite to growth and development. That change is going to cause some discomfort, but that discomfort is usually temporary. The result will get by being able to weather the storm and will be permanent if we stick with it. With all of the advent of AI and technology, all of this stuff going on, we have to be open to embrace change. That would be the first thing by far.

As you are reading this, what is your tolerance to embrace change? What if that simple shift of being more open to embracing change could transform your performance, transform your business, transform you being able to go out and set records in what it is that you do? We’re scratching the surface here. I wish we had hours and hours to be able to invest together to share. If people want to go deeper with your strategies, your insights on high performance, being a high performer in business and relationships in life, where can people go get access to some of the tools and resources you make available?

If they’re interested in the book, they can go to RaiseYourGameBook.com. There are a variety of things on there that they’ll find helpful even if they choose not to get the book. They can also go to AlanSteinJr.com and if you opt-in on my email list there, we’ll immediately send you a ten-page PDF I call the Key Themes, which are the major pillars that I talk about in my keynotes, my workshops and my training. It’s written in a way that even if you don’t ever attend one of my talks, you’ll understand the content that’s on there. I’ve tried to make it rich in takeaways and actionable steps. There’s not much fluff on there. It also includes the eight books every leader must read. I’ll give a spoiler alert. There are twelve of them because I couldn’t narrow it down to eight. Those are two resources and I’m @AlanSteinJr on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and all of the major social channels. I love engaging with folks. If something resonated and you want to chop it up a little bit more, please send me a DM or hit me up on one of the social channels. I would love to chat some more.

Don’t take this guy on in horse because he’s beaten Kevin Durant. He’s a trick shot artist. You might have your hands full if you challenge him to a game of horse.

I was going to try to hustle people like white men can’t jump but you’re right. That is sadly probably one of my claim to fame is that I did beat Kevin in a game of horse. I remember he blended, being incredibly irritated that he lost, but still was a good sport. He had some compassion and gave me a high five after.

If you want to go deeper with what Alan is sharing with you, you want more clarity, you want more confidence, and you want more direction as a high performer. The secrets to high performance, then I want to encourage you to go get the book. I want to make sure you have the opportunity now. Now is your time. The successful high performers do it now. They don’t wait. They don’t procrastinate. They don’t put off tomorrow or even five seconds what they should be doing right now. You can do that now at RaiseYourGameBook.com or go to AlanSteinJr.com where you can get these resources, the pillars, the recommended twelve books and a whole lot more. You won’t be disappointed. What is something I should have asked you in the course of our conversation that maybe I didn’t get a chance to ask?

I talk a lot about the glue that holds all of this together is accountability. How important it is for us to want to be held accountable, to surround ourselves with people that hold us accountable, and to have a mindset that holding someone accountable is not something you do to them. It’s something you do for them. If you’re a business owner, holding your folks accountable is how you show them that you care about them. You love them and value them. In fact, one of the worst things we can ever do is let people slide and let the people we care about get away with doing less than their best or less than they’re capable of. Holding high standard, it’s in holding people to those, whether it’s a parent to a child, whether it’s your spouse, whether it’s a co-worker or colleague. Holding people accountable is something all of us need and all of us should give as a gift to others.

You’ve got two boys and a daughter. At the time of this segment, your two boys are eight and your daughter is six.

Yes, third grade and first grade.

We need to realize that change is a prerequisite to growth and development. It’s going to cause some discomfort, but that discomfort is usually temporary. - Alan Stein, Jr. Click To Tweet

What are some of the traits of high performers if you had to pick a couple that you hope to instill in your kids?

I try to teach them to be good decision makers and what I’ve started teaching them at an early age was that every decision you make in this world would have a consequence. The consequence doesn’t necessarily mean negative, it’s simply a result. If you choose to eat breakfast every morning, the consequence is you’ll have more energy and you’ll have better focus later on in the day. If you choose not to eat breakfast, you won’t. I want them to tie their performance, their happiness and their achievement with the decisions they make. As basic as this sound, if you make good decisions, you have a good life. If you make great decisions, you have a great life. If you make poor decisions, life’s going to be challenging.

I’ve always encouraged my kids, whether it’s letting them order whatever they want when they go to a restaurant or what they want to wear. I want them to be decision makers because making decisions is a skill. It’s one that we need to practice. I find a lot of parents, unfortunately, coddle their children to the point where they make every decision for them then their kids are eighteen. They go out in the real world and they’ve never had to think for themselves. They’ve never had to pay a consequence for making a bad decision. I feel like they’re a little bit behind the eight-ball and that’s where all of us learn. I’ve made plenty of poor decisions in my life. Thankfully, I’ve learned from the vast majority of them and haven’t repeated them. That’s how you get better and that’s how you learn. I love my children more than anything in the world and I’m there to support them and encourage them. I try to have a hands-off approach and let them make as many decisions as possible because that’s an important skill set to develop.

What were you known for in high school?

I don’t know if I was known for anything. I was a decent basketball player and I usually had the gift of being able to make people laugh, at least in my small inner circles. I don’t think I was voted most likely to fill in the blank. I don’t think I ever stuck out at that mark.

 

What was it that got you integrated into working with all these high-profile athletes?

I had an opportunity through a lot of persistence to work for two local high school programs here in the Washington, DC area. Both were nationally renowned programs that sent most of their players onto the Division I College and eventually to the NBA. That ended up getting me some work with Nike, with the Jordan brand, and with USA Basketball. One of the unique things about my journey has been I spent several years at the high school level working with probably a dozen guys that are now in the NBA like Kevin Durant. I got to see the before picture and that led me to work with Nike, Jordan and USA Basketball where I got to work events for already established players like LeBron, Kobe, and Steve Nash. I got to see the after picture. I’ve been able to see the before and the after of what it takes to be an elite performer in basketball. Being able to see both of those vantage points has been incredibly valuable and more times not, someone only gets to see one or the other. I’m incredibly grateful that I was able to see both.

What are one to three actions steps you hope people take as a result of our conversation?

First is that they start focusing on self-awareness and they start thinking of how important it is. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but the way you heighten self-awareness is by asking others and asking those that know you the best. It’s important to ask your inner circle certain questions because they can help you see the blind spots you can’t see. You can only do that if you’ve established trust and you’ve created a fertile environment where it’s safe for them to be honest with you and tell you the things you need to hear, not the things you want to hear. If they only tell you what you want to hear, that’s not going to improve self-awareness.

Number one would be put a focus on self-awareness. Number two would make sure you are mastering the basics in whatever it is you’re trying to improve. If you want to have a narrow view and say you’re trying to improve in sales, you want to improve a relationship or you want to improve your free throw shooting, whatever it is you want to improve. Go back to the basics and live there. The last one which ties into that is it’s okay to have outcomes, but don’t get too caught up in them. Focus on the process. Focus on the bricks. Ask yourself every single morning when you wake up, “What can I do now that’s going to get me closer to what it is that I’m chasing? What can I do right now that will inch me forward to what it is that I desire?” If you can go back and at least have attention and focus on those three things, you’ll see performance start to increase at a rapid rate.

It's okay to have outcomes, but don't get too caught up in them. Focus on the process. - Alan Stein, Jr. Click To Tweet

He’s Alan Stein, Jr. I want to encourage you, go check out his book and check out his site. Alan, it has been a pleasure to have you with us here.

Thank you for everything you do. I appreciate this opportunity.

I want to make a mention. Alan’s kids are with him while he’s doing this interview. His daughter’s in his lap, his sons are behind him. Growth to Freedom is about the connection between business and family. You can do it both ways. You don’t have to give up one or the other. I bought into that nonsense a long time ago and made a transformation in the last few years. What I love is that your kids are with you. You talk about in your book about presents and such.

It’s funny because I had a chat with my kids before it started and I’m amicably divorced. The reason I bring that up is my schedule is compartmentalized. I have my children on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and every other weekend. Generally speaking, I do my best not to schedule things when I have my kids, but that’s the perfect world. We all live in a practical world, which sometimes means things have to give. This was the only time I could give you my full attention, which was incredibly important to me. I explained to them ahead of time, “Daddy’s got to jump on a video call and I need you guys to be on your best behavior while I do this.”

It also goes back to how important modeling is. My kids know how much I love what I do and how much meaning I find in my work. It’s okay for me to miss something here or there. It’s okay for me to have to take a call every once in a while when I have them because I’m showing them how much I love what I do. I do think that’s one of the best gifts I can give them. The good news is when we’re finished with this I’ll get back to giving them my full attention. We’re going to go out and enjoy a nice family dinner, have some good conversation and I’ll even share with them some of the lessons and fodder that you and I have been discussing.

As you reading right now, what encouraged you? What would have to happen for you to raise your game? Most people will focus on their business and they’ll leave leftovers to their kids. They’ll leave leftovers to their spouse, their partner, etc. You don’t have to. Raise your game not only means raise your game to be a high performer in the boardroom or in business as an entrepreneur, as an athlete or whatever. What could you do to raise your game? Appreciate the theme of this episode. Raise your game at home and in business, it can happen. He’s Alan Stein. Go check out what he’s up to. Thanks for being with us, Alan. I want to encourage you to take action with what Alan’s been sharing with you to raise your game in many different ways. Seize the day and make it a great week.

Resources mentioned in this episode: 

• Alan Stein, Jr
• Dr. Jeremy Weisz – Past episode
• High-Performance Secrets from the Best of the Best
• RaiseYourGameBook.com
• AlanSteinJr.com
• @AlanSteinJr – on Instagram
• Alan Stein on LinkedIn
• Alan Stein on Twitter
• GrowthToFreedom.com/Subscribe

About Alan Stein, Jr.

Alan Stein, Jr. is a coach, speaker, and author with expertise in improving organizational performance, cohesion, and accountability.

He spent 15+ years working with the highest performing basketball players on the planet… including NBA superstar Kevin Durant. He now travels the world teaching organizations how to utilize the same strategies in business that elite athletes use to perform at a world-class level.