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Coaching Mind's Podcast: Perform at your best!
Coaching Mind's Podcast: Perform at your best!
#116 - Success in Sports and Entrepreneurship with Dre Baldwin
Have you ever wondered what fuels the relentless drive of athletes and entrepreneurs alike? Dre Baldwin, the mastermind behind Work On Your Game Inc., pulls back the curtain on the power of mental toughness that's essential for triumphing in both arenas. Through the lens of his own transformation from a high school bench player to a professional athlete, Dre explains the pivotal role of discipline and confidence—tools that don't just elevate your game on the court, but can catapult your business ambitions to new heights.
Our conversation with Dre ventures into the contemporary intersection of sports and technology, where the digital age brings both challenges and opportunities. He shares wisdom on navigating the constant hum of social media and the comparisons it invites, offering advice on building a personal fortress of self-belief that stands unshaken amidst the noise. For athletes wrestling with the online world, and coaches steering them towards growth, Dre's insights are a compass for maintaining mental clarity and focus.
As we trace Dre's footsteps into the entrepreneurial sphere, we unravel how the tenets of athletic discipline translate seamlessly into the business playbook. Dre's journey from athlete to thought leader, and the birth of Your Game University, serves as a vivid illustration of how sports-derived principles can reach far beyond the court, fostering high performance in any field. For those captivated by Dre's story and eager to cultivate such a mindset, his transition is not just instructive but inspirational, marking the trail from strategic dribbling to strategic business thinking.
As CEO and Founder of Work On Your Game Inc., Dre Baldwin has given 4 TEDxTalks on Discipline, Confidence, Mental Toughness & Personal Initiative and has authored 33 books. He has appeared in national campaigns with Nike, Finish Line, Wendy's, Gatorade, Buick, Wilson Sports, STASH Investments and DIME magazine.
- Dre has published over 8,000 videos to 142,000+ subscribers, his content being viewed over 100 million times.
- Dre's daily Work On Your Game Podcast has over 2,600 episodes and more than 7 million downloads.
- In just 5 years, Dre went from the end of his high school team's bench to a 9-year professional basketball career. He played in 8 countries including Lithuania, Germany, Montenegro, Slovakia and Germany.
- Dre invented his Work On Your Game framework as a "roadmap in reverse" to help professionals with mindset, strategy, accountability and execution.
- A Philadelphia native, Dre lives in Miami.
Contact Dre or learn more at: http://DreAllDay.com/
Are you an ATHLETE looking to take your training to the next level? Check out our website to learn more about 1-on-1 training opportunities:
mentaltrainingplan.com/athletes
Are you a COACH looking for an affordable year-round mental performance training program? Check out the MTP Academy available through our website:
mentaltrainingplan.com/academy
Hey you welcome to the coaching minds podcast, the official podcast of mental training plan. Our mission is to empower coaches with the tools and insights to develop the mental side of the game for their athletes, both on and off the field. We believe in deliberate planning and execution, because just hoping you'll be at your best when it matters the most is Not good enough. Today I've got Dray Baldwin with me, and Dray, I would love to. To start off, just tell the audience a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Speaker 2:Sure, I appreciate you having me on, ben. Who am I? I have this company called work on your game. What we do is we extract the tools to help athletes reach the top of the sports world. We teach them the business people so you perform it there highest level, do so consistently and, of course, make money in business. But the same things you want to do in sports, we teach people how to do it in business, and background just comes from being an athlete and extracting those things in the sports world and Realizing through. I'm sure we'll talk about how I found out that those tools that work on the court also work in the boardroom.
Speaker 1:For sure. So take us back to your playing days. Tell us just a little bit about kind of your background as a basketball player and and how you sort of grew up and what you saw Specifically maybe in the mental side of the game as you were going through your career.
Speaker 2:Sure. So grew up in Philadelphia, pa, based in South Florida now, but growing up was into every sport, played a little bit everything, tried a little bit of football and never seriously played travel. But a baseball, which I did play, but I wasn't good, I was no mediocrity was my ceiling. Eventually moved over to basketball age 14 it's pretty late if you're trying to go somewhere in the sport. So high school only played one year was my senior year and I sat the bench. I like to tell people, ben, I had the best seats in the house, right at the front row on the bench, watching all the games, scored two points per game as a high school senior. Walked on the plane in college. It was naturally I was not recruited to play college ball. Walked on that a division three school and I did play but didn't set the world on fire and on top of that is only a D3, so it didn't really matter. When he came to like the next level, professional and at the pro level, I was able to hustle my way, had to hustle my way into playing pro ball, which I was able to do, started a nine-year career While doing that, start putting videos on his brand new website called YouTube and I started my program in 2005, so when I say brand new, I do literally mean brand new, and through that that's when I started to build an audience online.
Speaker 2:After a few years, those players started asking questions about my approach, because they Knew a little bit about my story, because I would respond to the comments, and then they was just see I was putting our content so consistent. And this is before it was a normal thing to just be putting content on the internet for free, like that wasn't a thing. So they started asking now, what keeps you coming to the gym to work out every day? Or how do you get the confidence to perform in a game the way you do in practice? Or why'd you keep trying when you face all these setbacks? Or how do you even get started doing any of this stuff?
Speaker 2:And from there I started to formulate the, the foundation of the framework that became work on your game, just talking about discipline, confidence, mental toughness, personal initiative same things you need in sports. I mean things that we need in sports. And what happened was been once people who were not athletes Started finding those videos where I would talk about mindset and they would say, dre, I don't even play sports, but the way you're describing mindset and where you're talking about it, this applies to me as well, and I'm not even an athlete. So that's how I knew who I would serve, or who I could serve, outside of just the realm of sports, because I always knew I was going to take what I was doing outside of the sports base. So that was the starting point of it. But this was five years before I started playing, so by the time I stopped playing already knew what I was going to do next, and that's what I do now.
Speaker 1:So talk to us a little bit about. You're a, you're a high school senior, you're you brand new to the sport and you decide you know what? I'm gonna go play college basketball. Walk us through maybe that, that decision process, maybe where that confidence came from, was it? You know, I know that this is what I want to do and I want to become a professional basketball player after that. Was it just? I love this game. Take it, take us back to those college days.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So and I don't know if there was even a decision process been, I think give me a little bit too much credit. I think it was. Just I was playing basketball and I could feel that I was getting better, even though I didn't have any tangible proof that I was getting better. So I wasn't making any teams, I wasn't putting up any stats or making any. No, all city teams or anything like that, anything that was the good players. I wasn't on that list. But I could feel myself getting better because I was just going to the playground and just practicing on my own. And playing in the local pick-up games at the park was what we do when you're from where I'm from, and Even though I only made it my senior year on to the team, that was an accomplishment for me because I was at least on the roster. All right, that was a big deal to just be on the roster. At least I made the basketball team, so it was some validation for all the effort that I was putting to getting better.
Speaker 2:So I knew that I was going to college period. Whether I was playing sports or not, I knew I was going to go to college, I wanted to go to college it was. It was a great excuse to get out of, get out of the house, so I get on my parents house. So, whatever school I ended up at, I knew I was just going to try to walk on to the basketball team, because I knew that was the thing that they have open tryouts for whoever shows up. Luckily, I went to a school that was pretty small, so I got to be a medium-sized fish and a pretty small pond and Got on a basketball team pretty quickly. So there I was probably the most talented player on the team. My freshman year I didn't put up the best stats, but I knew I had the most talent and I was still again. I was still getting better. Because the thing is then you start playing basketball on your five. You may have basically maxed out on your talent by the time you're 15, but I'd start playing when I was 14.
Speaker 2:So by the time I was 18, I was still on this learning for a while. I was still on this growth curve of getting better at basketball. So I was still improving, whereas most of my teammates were pretty much they were who they were going to be and Now I was just staying in the gym. Same thing I did when I was in the playground and didn't have access to a facility. Now make college have access to a facility so now I can use the indoor gym. So I just kept practicing and just kept using that and getting better.
Speaker 2:I ended up getting recruited, actually from a, the school I was first. That was not even full-fledged D3 at the time it was provisional. What's basically meant you can only play two years of sports. So after my freshman year I got recruited to a school that was a four-year. D3 was another step up and again, that was more validation for me. And Continue. I finished out my career there and, even though I didn't set the world on fire, I was on the team. I was on the roster, I was one of the best players on campus again, not a big deal at a D3, but something. And that was where I met one of my teammates. He knew some people who had played overseas, so he knew about the overseas thing.
Speaker 2:But for me in college it was just continuing to work on my game, continuing to use the facilities, continuing to lift weights, which I got introduced to when I was in college, and I just pieced together in my mind what do I need to do to get better. I knew I needed to get physically stronger. I need to work on know this part of my game, this the jump shot, the handle, whatever I just did, whatever I've logically made sense to me to improve because at this time what's remember is not like I'm pulling up Instagram or YouTube to Figure out how to practice these things didn't exist, so I was going off of my, just my practical knowledge. I won't call it common sense because it wasn't common sense. It was just practical, deductive reasoning as to what I could do to improve my game.
Speaker 1:That's all I did Talk to us a little bit about. I mean cuz there there's got to be some pretty strong mindset here that's starting to develop, because there's a lot of kids who, in that situation, would look around and would see all of the problems, all the reasons that you're a little bit behind. You know you've got all these people that are on your team that are starting and you're sitting on the bench as a high schooler and you know you're playing at a small provisional D3 school, like there's plenty of opportunity for you to feel sorry for yourself, for you to make excuses, for you to say, well, I just you know I'm a little bit behind developmentally or I've got such a long way to go. Talk to us a little bit about. You know, how does this, how does your mindset start developing through these times?
Speaker 2:Great points that you make. There been in a couple of things. Number one, I was dumb enough to keep trying, and number two, ben, it was actually a blessing in disguise that we didn't have all the technology and accessibility to each other back then that we have now. And the reason why is because of everything that you just said because, see, at age 16 or 17, I'm sitting on the bench, not really playing, don't really have much accomplishment, I'm not being recruited None of those things that you would think an athlete who's on a pro trajectory would have. I didn't have any of that, and my parents not only my parents would ship me around the AAU tournaments. And I played a second AAU basketball. And had I been 16, 17 today, going through that same thing, I would have been looking on my phone, seeing all the other players my age doing what I was not doing and figuring well, this must be proof that I'm doing the wrong thing. I would have given up on basketball and all that talent would have went with it, or that potential talent would have went with it, because it wasn't really talent at that point. So it was actually good that I didn't have access to see all the stuff that you just described. I maybe could have theorized that that was happening. And back then I mean back then you know, you look at magazines and you would see the all American top 100 players in the nation in your age bracket or something like that, and you would see that and I said, okay, I know I'm not on that list, but it got to be a whole bunch more players who were out there that are also not on that list. They were actually doing something. So I'm in the same boat as them. And again, you don't know what you don't know. So the ignorance was actually a beautiful thing. Ignorance is bliss, as they say. So, and at the same time, I was also. I'm the type of person who I don't know.
Speaker 2:If you're familiar with the big five personality traits, then, but one of them is a disagreeableness, or agreeableness or disagreeable. I've always been high on a disagreeable scale, meaning it doesn't mean being a negative person or a nasty person. What it means is you're a type of person who is willing to go against the grain. Also, the reason why I was only. I was the only player on the basketball team in the gym working on my game outside of team requirements. I was the one in the gym lifting weights. When nobody told us to lift weights, nobody mandated that we do it, I would always give my extra time whenever I had any to continue to work on my game. That's why I continued to get better. So and because and also that I had the belief that I could go to a level that nothing in my present reality said I could go to that level. All of that is part of my.
Speaker 2:That disagreeability again, which has really nothing to do with other people, is more about you looking at yourself and your situation to saying can I see something here, even though nobody else sees anything here. So for me to answer your question here, in the big picture it was the discipline of continuing to work on my game. It was the ignorance of not knowing what I didn't know about, what it was supposed to look like if I was going to become the person who played at the next level. And that discipline piece I just give credit to my parents, who are not athletes, not even six feet tall and 64. Neither of my parents is even close to six feet. But they taught, know the discipline of do your chores, do your homework, know be respectful, know do good in school, that kind of discipline, and they went to work every day, even though, again, they were not athletes. I just took that same discipline and I was. That was modeled for me at home and I applied it to the basketball court. Love that.
Speaker 1:So how would you, how would you maybe suggest that coaches go about interacting with players nowadays, who can get on pretty quick, pretty easy, and not only can, they are literally surrounded every second of the day by this clip, that clip, this highlight reel. How do you, how do you maybe recommend that either the athletes or the coaches that are working with the athletes handle that?
Speaker 2:Well, the first thing is the player has to have a. The player has to have a conversation with themselves before they will listen to anything that the coach says. I've always been a firm believer in that, and that's even when I'm working with people who are not athletes. There are certain things that you have to say to yourself before you're going to absorb anything that I say to you. So that means you have to have some level of belief within yourself that you can actually make it to level a, b or C, whatever is going to be, and then whatever somebody says is just going to be like Velcro is going to stick to what's already in you. But if there's no Velcro works, you need two pieces. So if there's no Velcro in you, then there's nothing I say is going to stick to you. So you have to have something in you that actually believes that, and I can't put that in you. You got to have it, you got to show up with that, and this is, I would think. I'm not a sports coach, but I would think most sports coaches. They look for certain types of players and this is probably part of the formula. Right? Does this player have this? And each coach has different things that they want, but I would guess that every sport coach out there is looking for certain things and certain players, and if they know that certain things are not there, doesn't matter how much talent or potential a player has, that coach might have to turn that player down because they don't have this. And I can't help, I can't work with this guy. So you got to have a little bit of this in yourself and just this little bit that I've we talked about here so far been.
Speaker 2:What I'm telling you is that when I just started playing at 14 again, I didn't have anybody take me under my wing, under their wing. Nobody taught me how to play. Nobody said I see potential, when you dry, I'm going to make you into a player. No, it was me going to the park again, outside playground court that anyone had access to. I was just go out there when nobody else was out there and work on my game on my own volition, because I chose to. Nobody else in the neighborhood was out there.
Speaker 2:Again, what's the difference between me and everybody else? Everybody knew what a court was. Everyone knew what a playground was. Is just that I made the decision to go out there and do the work when they did and when it was in college, same thing. Everyone had access to a beautiful facility where all the students everyone can access the gym. And again, this is not this D3, so it's not like there's a basketball gym, there's a one gym. I was only one in there working on my game. I was the one in there lifting weights. There was something inside of me that wanted to do that. Any coach could have helped me get to the pro, helped me, quote unquote get to the pro level, because I was going to get there, whether they helped me or not, and that was my decision. So it starts with the person that you're working with and then the coaches. Again, you can only, as they say, the horse to the water can make a drink.
Speaker 1:Let's say there is a, there's a player who wants to head in that direction. They have, they have maybe a little taste of okay, maybe this is, maybe this is a possibility. You know, on the on the fear to faith scale, like they've moved out of fear, maybe they're into that doubt. Like you know, I'm just okay, maybe I'm just not sure this is going to happen. How can we help them take that next step kind of into believing? All right, yeah, yeah, I can do this. How do we, how do we help develop that internal Velcro that you were talking about?
Speaker 2:Great question. I think it's three specific traits that anyone has to have. They're going to be coached from where they are to where they want to go. There's some potential that can be grown in them. The three traits are being coachable, being committed and willing to get uncomfortable. You need all three. Being coachable just means that you're willing to have somebody tell you hey, here's where you can improve, here's how this is. You're not doing this one quite right. Here's where I see a little bit of slippage. Here. I'm gonna hold you accountable because this part wasn't done the way that I showed you how it needs to be done.
Speaker 2:A lot of people are simply not coachable, even athletes, I'm sure you know I haven't worked with plenty of athletes and it me and myself haven't been teammates with a lot of athletes, hearing from a ton of athletes being in, and I've been online for so many years. I hear from athletes all the time. A lot of athletes are simply not coachable. They just don't want to listen. They don't want anyone to tell them anything. If someone does tell them something, instead of taking it as what it is, which is coaching, they take it as criticism. And correction is not criticism. Someone's telling you a correction. Hey, we need to fix this. That's not a criticism. And even if you take it as a criticism, you should be happy because someone who knows more than you offers your criticism. You should be glad because otherwise they could have said nothing left. You do and let you keep messing up until you get in the game and let the opponent show you that you messed up, and by that point it's too late.
Speaker 2:So being willing to accept coaching is number one. Number two you got to be committed to what you want. If you're committed to this goal, you need to understand that what you've been doing up to this point is not going to get you there in time for you to make the most of the goal, which means I'm going to push you this is the coach talking. I'm going to push you to do some things that you otherwise probably wouldn't do, but as long as you're committed to the goal, then we're going to get there. Which means if I tell you be at the gym at six o'clock, when I walk in the gym at 545, you should be there already. I shouldn't be calling you. You should be calling me. If I don't call you for a week about working out, you should be calling me three days into that week and saying, hey, coach, when can we work out again? What else do I need to do? I did everything you told me. What's the next thing I need to do? Someone who's highly committed. That person you can work with.
Speaker 2:But a person who's not committed, they're not bought in. Then you find yourself as a coach wanting it for them more than they want it for themselves. There's only so far you could take that person. A person has to be in. They have to want it. These people are. They are few and far between, but it doesn't mean there's not a whole lot of them. There's eight billion people on the planet. It's not everybody, but there's a pocket of those people.
Speaker 2:You want to look for that committed type. And the third type is a person who's willing to get uncomfortable. If you're being coasted and you're willing to and you're committed, you're going to be pushed to be uncomfortable. You just have to be accepting of that discomfort when it happens, because all the growth in life happens outside of our comfort zone. So most people are familiar with that saying or some form of it. You have to be willing to step outside of what you're used to doing in order to get something that you have not had up until this point. Logically, that makes perfect sense to everyone. It's the emotional acceptance of it that matters the most as to whether or not you're willing to do the things that are going to make you uncomfortable. So coaching, coachable, committed and willing to get uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:I love that and I feel like, as you know, coaches that are working with high school athletes that are obviously not choosing or recruiting who they have, they kind of they have, who they have. I think those three areas are definitely something that you know is worth intentional time talking about those, maybe having the some of the older athletes talk to the younger athletes and give some examples of how this has helped. I love those three points. Let's go back to your story, dre. So we're now. You're now in college and you've got dreams that you know what my playing days aren't over. What are those next steps look like for you?
Speaker 2:Well, first thing is in college, the first year, I was just trying to figure out how do I get out of here, because I know I only had two years, all right. So the first thing is I need to somehow some way get myself recruited, and I think it'd be useful for the players out there to hear how this happened. So after my freshman year, I'm at Penn State Admington, which is right outside of Philadelphia, and Penn State University has 23 campuses. So I'm at Penn State Admington. This is the provisional D3 school, only two years eligibility. So after my freshman year, I'm like man I only got one more year of basketball. I have to somehow some way either play my way out of here or something has to happen for me to get out of here.
Speaker 2:So that summer, because Admington is a commuter campus, meaning has no dorms, no on-campus housing I'm living at home, still driving back and forth between school every day, 20 minutes. So I would use the facility. In the summertime I was not taking classes, but I would drive up to the campus every day and just use the facility to work on my game. One random one day, randomly, I'm in the cafeteria just getting some food before I go work out and a random guy approaches me. He starts asking me questions about what position I play, etc. Etc. I don't know what this guy? Admington's a small campus so I know he's not from there. He hands me a business card, turns out he works at Penn State, altoona. This is the full FLEDS four-year division three school. He's a recruiter, he works in the academic office, but he also is the basketball coach as well, because back then the basketball coach's job wasn't even a full-time job. So he had just recruited me on the spot because he later told me he didn't know who I was but he thought I looked like the kind of player he knew he needed for his roster following year. And then later on he went and did his due diligence and found out that I could actually play. So he was guessing, so I could have been the biggest bum on campus, but he recruited me on the spot anyway. But the whole point, the reason I shared our story, is because the only reason that I ran into that guy because again he was not planning to meet me, he wasn't even in the gym when we met the only reason I met that guy is because I, on my own volition again, was coming to the campus every day to use the facility because it was available to me to work on my game. None of my teammates were there. None of my teammates were coming to the gym. I had that whole gym to myself that whole summer because I was working on my game.
Speaker 2:So that's how I got recruited to Penn State Altoona where I finished out my career, and there one of my teammates he knew some guys who had played basketball overseas. He and I were the only two guys on campus who would ever come to the gym by ourselves and just practice. The rest of our teammates will come to the gym. If we said, hey, everybody comes to the gym, we're gonna play pickup, everybody will come. Or if the coaches said we have practice at four o'clock, of course everybody comes to practice. But it wasn't one of those two occasions and we were. Somebody was just in the gym on their own. It was just me and my teammate.
Speaker 2:My teammate was Piper, who was a powerscared. He's a coach actually to this very day and he and I kind of bonded over the fact that we were the only guys who would do that and he said, yeah, no, guys who play overseas. Here's what we need to do because we're coming from this school. You know you go to these things it's called exposure camps and hopefully you play pretty well, you get some footage, you get a scouting report and there maybe you get an agent or a coach or a manager or a scout. They see you, they like your game and they can connect you to people who could possibly get you on overseas. So he's the one who gave me the blueprint, the framework for what we needed to do, and that's what I spent my college years doing, just, of course, in addition to the playing, but always working on my game and based on where we were was in central Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2:There are a lot of other schools around, so we would go play pick up against the main campus guys at the state college campus.
Speaker 2:We go to some other D2 and D1 colleges around the area.
Speaker 2:They were all within 30, 40 minutes driving, so we would go play pick up with these guys and build relationships or somebody knew somebody, maybe knew a girl, maybe you know a guy, maybe you had a friend, and we would go to those campuses and play pick up just to measure our games against those other players who were allegedly above us, because it'll level that they were at compared to the level that we were at, and I always just had it in my mind that I know I could play at the pro level.
Speaker 2:I just had to figure out how am I going to prove it? That was the only thing I knew. I needed to figure out how to prove it because I knew from the school that I went to been nobody here. No matter what you did, it wasn't going to get you signed to a protein based on your performance at school. You were going to have to do something in addition, because I've seen players who put a way better stats than me. They never got a chance, they never got a sniff. So I knew I was going to have to do something extra. So that's what I just had my mind on that the whole time.
Speaker 1:You're playing overseas. Walk us through some of the maybe some of the lessons that you learned throughout your nine years there. You know just about continuing this work ethic, continuing to be coachable and committed and willing to get uncomfortable. You know now, all of a sudden, you are playing with guys that are at your level. You're not the big man on campus or the medium fish and the small pond, as you said. How do you walk us through what those times were like?
Speaker 2:First thing was great to have seven footers on your team. When you play at the D3 level there are no seven footers walking around, so our center was about 6'6". So there were times I was playing backup center in college, but at the pro level that didn't happen. You got actual seven feet guys, so you actually have some space on a basketball court. But the biggest thing that people need to know about best about playing overseas is that, especially as an American, when you're in those countries, and especially if you're the only American on your roster, that everybody is watching you at all times and you are being evaluated every day, even in practice. And I've seen American players go places overseas or even to, let's say, south or Central America was technically not overseas, but we call it all overseas. You go over to one of those places and you have a bad couple of days of practice. They will send you home before you even get a chance to play in the game, which means is every day you have to impress. You're expected to impress every single day, even in the trainings. Even if we go to the weight room, even if we're practicing it, we're outside running. You are expected to impress because the vision that they have of you, at least at the time that I was playing, was that you were supposed to be head and shoulders above all the other players because they're from America. That was the mindset that people had then and that meant every day was like the game. I started treating every day, every practice was like the game, because that's the way that they're evaluating you, because they have an expectation of you and if you don't live up to the expectation, do you know how many players there are in America waiting to take your job? A whole bunch of them. So every day, your job is on or not. So I just started to treat practice like the game. The other thing is, in many countries over there most countries over there, as a matter of fact they don't play nearly as many games as you see in the NBA. So people who are listening to or watching this and you're used to watching the NBA you see the Knicks and the Lakers playing 82 games. In six months. We might play half as many games, less than half as many games in the same amount on a time, which means all those days when the Knicks and Lakers have games, we have practice.
Speaker 2:I was in Montenegro, for example. We would practice twice a day, every day, monday through Friday, and the games will be on Saturday. So that's 10 practices for every one game and you have to show up to those practices. As an American, you have to show up, but you can't win them. I can win them playing in Montenegro. There's a bunch of Montenegro's and Serbians there that I can't win them. They're all watching me and if I'm loafing off in practice I might lose my job because again, I heard of players having this happen. So I would have some of my teammates who tried to tell me hey, you ain't got to do all those dunks, save your legs for the game. I said I can't, you're not in the same situation, that I'm in. All right, I got to make sure.
Speaker 2:Every day they're saying okay, there's a reason why we got this guy on the roster, because I'm a bigger investment. When you're coming from over there, overseas, you are first of all. They have to pay money to bring you there, because it costs money to fly you from the USA to there. They have to put you in an apartment, they have to pay for your food and they have to pay for you need access to the internet. All of these things they usually don't have to pay for for the other guys. So there's a bigger investment to have you. That may be in a visa or an import fee, so to bring a player from outside of the country into this national league, there's money you have to pay to have that player on the roster and you might be making more money than many of your teammates. So all of these things are bigger investments for the team to have you as an American on the roster, which means every day you need to make sure you are doing things to justify the investment that they're making in you.
Speaker 2:They don't tell you this, but again, I understood this stuff by deductive reason. I just understood it. Okay, I know it's costing them more money to bring me here. I better show up every day. I can't not play hard in practice. I can't. Again, I'm not just one of the guys on this team, so I never carried myself like I was just one of the guys. You might be able to blend in if you had other Americans on roster, but the most Americans I ever had as a teammate was one. I never had more than one American teammate and many times I was playing I was the only American on the team. So I know the spotlight was on me, but I didn't mind, because I was always preparing myself in off seasons for how will I be in better shape, how will I be a better player than everybody else in here? And I wanted to be obvious every single day.
Speaker 1:And how does that pressure of expectation, that expectation of success, how does that elevate your performance and not become just this, this heavy weight, this heavy pressure that just crushes you or frustrates you? Like, talk to us a little bit about mindset, wise. How do you show up every day, even on those days that you're not feeling like it?
Speaker 2:Excellent question.
Speaker 2:We'll call that doing your homework. And doing your homework means you prepare yourself ahead of time for that expectation. So when you know it's coming, what you do is you prepare yourself in the off season. You prepare yourself mentally, you prepare yourself physically so that when you get there and that gets thrown at you it's not a burden for you. You're actually ready for it. You're already ready.
Speaker 2:I knew this was coming and there's a framework we have here. We call it the third day, and the third day is all about showing up and giving your best effort when you least feel like it. And we call it the third day because often when we start things especially in sport or if anything physical like fitness, working out is usually about that third day that the newness has worn off, the novelty of the situation has gone and your body's starting to feel a little sore and you realize that this thing that you signed up for is not going to be all fun and game. So this is not going to be one big party. There's actual work involved here. And am I going to show up and give my best effort and make sure people can see that I'm in the position that I'm in for a reason. Can you keep showing up like that on a consistent basis? That's what the third day is about.
Speaker 2:And the third day is not just about is not about at all really motivating yourself even though if you're motivated, I'm sure I can help. It's really about doing a preparatory work and strategizing and having a system for getting yourself ready for that challenging day before it happens. And this is the hallmark of the professional, then, is that the professional is always prepared before a situation occurs, so that they're ready for it when it happens. They don't get ready when the situation occurs. That's what amateurs do. So the professional does their homework to find out what is going to be expected of them, and then they prepare themselves for that expectation. As a matter of fact, they prepare themselves for more than is expected of them. So then, whatever is asked of them is actually easy compared to what they prepare for.
Speaker 1:So now, how do you take this into the business world? You know, at some point all of us, as athletes, our athletic time is going to end, at least as a player, and we're going to have to now transition into the real world, the business world, whatever you want to call it. Talk to us about how you took all of this and said let's now apply this to real life.
Speaker 2:So the first thing is, when I was in college I responded to a bulletin board ad that was just advertising make some extra money on the side in the summer, Because I was a college athlete before. Named Image and Lightness was meant you basically have two jobs and you're not allowed to make any money. So I was a broke out, let's get it. So I responded to this ad and it happened to be this guy was in network marketing. Now, while I did not build a career in network marketing, I did dabble in it a bit and going to those meetings, I got introduced to, first of all, the concept of personal development, which I wasn't familiar with at the time, and secondly, I got introduced to just some concepts of entrepreneurship which I had not been taught, even though I have a full four year business degree. So in reading a book called Wrist Ad, Poor Dab by Robert Kiyosaki, I got introduced just to some concepts of entrepreneurship and I kept that in the back of my mind. I said, when I get done playing sports because I knew what you just said there've been sports doesn't last forever. Eventually your career is going to be over. I want to go into the business world. I didn't know how would do it or when or what I was going to do when I got there. But I knew I wanted to do it. So as I started going back in the story here, putting out those YouTube videos on mindset, and people who didn't play sports started telling me hey, Dre, this applies to me as well. And then he asked me to say to me Dre, man, you sound like a philosopher, you sound like a professional speaker, and when you talk and when you explain these things, this stuff is just as valuable as the basketball stuff. I said, okay, well, when I get out, when I get done playing basketball, maybe I can go into some space where I just know talk to people and explain to them mindset. Maybe there's some business for that.
Speaker 2:I didn't know there was a such thing as professional speaking. I didn't know. Nobody knew that you know, being able to put your own books out there was going to come. No one knew that podcasting existed, but no one knew that it was going to become what it became. We weren't using phrases like influencers and social media and content. None of those things existed at the time, but they all started to come about around this time during the last half of my career. So we're talking 2010 to about 2015.
Speaker 2:And that's when I started to build these things all at the same time. And again, this is where I started building audience of people who were not athletes but they liked the fact that I was an athlete because I'm coming from a different angle than someone who just came from, let's say, a college classroom. I was coming from the angle of being an athlete and I was taking the athlete stuff and I was transmuting it into the business world and people really liked that and still do it to this very day. So that was really my segue into it, on top of the fact that I've always been a kind of a computer geek, internet geek, so always reading, always looking into hey, how can I take this thing that I have on line? I have this audience of people and I knew probably about 2009 then that whatever I was doing online was going to be bigger than what I did in basketball.
Speaker 2:And I mean, that's pretty much how it turned out, because even these days, I spent nine years as a professional athlete. But if I go to the mall and somebody recognizes me, 99% of the time is from YouTube. It's not because they know that I played basketball overseas. Americans don't watch basketball overseas, so just because you played, nobody knows. They know because you told them, but it's not like they saw you playing. People know me from the internet, so what I was doing online has always been bigger than what I did as a pro athlete.
Speaker 1:And, as we kind of start to wrap up here, talk us through what you're doing now. Talk us through, maybe, who you're working with, some of the big lessons that you're teaching, or update us with, kind of today.
Speaker 2:Our main focus these days is working on your game university. That's the place where we do all our high level coaching, consulting, training, speaking all of our programs and there we're working with high level professionals, high level performers or people who want to get into that top 2% at what they do, and we work with people from a very eclectic range. So we have doctors, we have people in the health space, people with storefronts, offline businesses, people in online businesses. Of course, you have some people who are in my same lane maybe they're former athletes who are now moving into the thought leadership space, such as doing coaching and speaking and writing books but we have people from so many different backgrounds because the principles of what I extracted from the sports world and applied to the business world, those principles apply across the board.
Speaker 2:See, the thing about principles is that they apply no matter where you take them, and I understand the principles of business as well because I've become a student of entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, leadership, communication skills. The principles that I've taken from those things apply in any business, to any type of person. So this is why people often ask me well, Jerry, who's the main type of industry that you work with? Well, there isn't one. I just told you all these different types of people we work with for a reason because our principles apply across the board in what we do. And my superpower amongst all the stuff that we talked about here, then my superpower is insight, and insight is the ability to look at information, interpret it, discern what matters, what doesn't matter, separate the most important pieces that this person needs from what they don't need, and then help them to apply it. That is my superpower, and it's the same thing that I use in sports. It's the same thing that I use now.
Speaker 1:I love that, and one of the final questions I always like to ask guests is knowing what you know. Now, if you were to go back and tell yourself something as an athlete, what would that maybe one big piece of advice be?
Speaker 2:Well it would be everything. But if I had to pick one, it would be mastering that concept of the third day, which I started to figure out once I was in the pros, because it was literally the life or death of your career whether you could show up every day or not. And I think if I had understood that better as a college athlete, maybe even a high school athlete, I probably would have had a better amateur career than I did.
Speaker 1:Love that Well. Thank you so much for joining us today, dre. It's been wonderful having you on the show. If people want to get ahold of you, what's the easiest way to do that?
Speaker 2:Easiest way is that whole concept of the third day. I'll give people a free copy of that book. Can I share it? Yeah, absolutely Sure. So if we're on video, here's the book right here, called the Third Day, the decision to separate the pros from the amateurs Literally what I've just described. So I'll give you a book free paperback version. All we ask that you're covered with shipping. Just go to thirddaybookcom Books free, just cover the shipping, and once you do that, you'll be on our email list and you'll find out very quickly our email every single day. So you'll be in the emails every day. I still write a ton every day once you get this book. As far as anything else social media is, I'm on every single one of them. So whichever one you like to use the most is with my name up. I am the hardest person to not finalize Everything's public and then work on your game universitycom. So we do all our coaching.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning into the Coaching Minds podcast. If you found value in today's episode, would love for you to share it with a friend or a fellow coach that might benefit from our discussions. If you're curious about taking your team's mental game to the next level, don't forget to check out mtpacademy. And until next time, make your plan and put it to work.