How Champions Think: In Sports and in Life

by Bob Rotella

I’m talking about a desire so fierce that it changes a person’s life. Exceptional people begin with just such ambitions.

They have confirmed my belief that the ideas people choose to have about themselves largely determine the quality of the lives they lead. We can choose to believe in ourselves, and thus to strive, to risk, to persevere, and to achieve. Or we can choose to cling to security and mediocrity.

We can fall in love with our own abilities and our own potential, then choose to maximize those abilities. Or we can decide that we have no special talents or abilities and try to be happy being safe and comfortable.

will. Our grandparents and great-grandparents migrated and struggled for many years to give us the freedom we now have, a precious birthright. We’re free to choose what we’re going to think about ourselves. No one can stop us from chasing our dreams. Yet many people today choose to squander this birthright. They choose to believe that because of where they were born or who their parents are, they don’t have a fair chance in life. They’re choosing to believe that the competition—from America and around the world—is just too tough. They’re choosing to believe in someone else’s talent more than their own. They’re choosing to be mediocre.

I have no trouble with someone who strives to be the best and finishes in the middle of the pack. There’s honor in that. I don’t see that person as a failure. To the contrary, he will come to the end of his days with a smile on his face, because he spent the time and talent God gave him having a ball, finding out how good he could get.

LeBron would have disappointed a lot of people if he hadn’t made himself into a great basketball player. Pat, had she been mediocre, would only have confirmed people’s expectations.

knew. In basketball, as in golf, as in almost any sport involving motor skills, an athlete gets the best results when he doesn’t think. Once an athlete has learned a skill—as LeBron had learned to shoot a basketball—he needs to trust that skill, focus on the target, and let the shot go without thinking about how to do it or being concerned about the result. In slightly more scientific terms, the subconscious areas of our minds do the best job of controlling motor skills. When the conscious brain gets involved, our bodies tend to become awkward. Doubt has a way of turning on that conscious brain, which is why confident shooters are better than shooters who lack confidence. A great deal of my work with athletes revolves around teaching them how to keep the conscious mind inactive or quiet when they’re performing.

I did tell him that I thought he could benefit from one of the standard methods of sports psychology, visualization. I wanted him to see himself making three-point shots. I suggested that he ask the Cavaliers’ staff to make a highlight video for him, about eight to twelve minutes long. This video would be a LeBron James long-range shooting montage.

All of this would help him improve his three-point shooting, because it would feed the right sorts of images to his subconscious, helping him become a more trusting, confident shooter. But if improvement were as easy as watching videos, the NBA would have a lot more great three-point shooters. It isn’t. The mental game is a big part of sport, but it must be combined with physical competence.

The actual number of shots I suggested was not as important, in my mind, as the idea that LeBron would set a practice goal for himself, commit to achieving it every day, and wait patiently for results.

I told him patience was essential because I had no way of predicting how long it would take to see improvement in his shooting statistics if he took my suggestions. But the patience and tenacity required were factors that could help him separate himself from his peers.

To encourage LeBron to persevere, I told him about my belief that great basketball shooters, like great golfers and great baseball hitters, are for the most part made rather than born.

He and Pat Bradley had hard work in common. Pat didn’t make it to the LPGA Tour Hall of Fame just because she wanted to. She used that desire to fuel hours and weeks and years of dedication and practice. Her dreams were her starting point.

The way he chose to think about himself would drive him through the workouts, the visualization exercises, and all the other things he needed to do to improve. That’s why the way he saw himself was his most important talent.

And I have no doubt that the success LeBron has enjoyed is due to the kind of hard work we talked about that day, to his dedication to improvement, and to his strong commitment to team success.

The vital importance of that sort of attitude is the foremost thing I have learned about exceptionalism in my decades of work with people striving to be great. Talent, conventionally defined, is of course part of the equation. As Bear Bryant once said, “When was the last time you saw a jackass win the Kentucky Derby?” But there are many people with physical talent, just as there are many people with raw intelligence.

What sets merely talented people apart from exceptional people can’t be measured by vertical leap, or time for the forty-yard dash, or length off the tee, or IQ. It’s something internal. Great performers share a way of thinking, a set of attitudes and attributes like optimism, confidence, persistence, and strong will. They all want to push themselves to see how great they can become.

In the Book of Ecclesiastes, it was written that the runner with the best foot speed doesn’t always win the race and the strongest warrior doesn’t always win the battle. That knowledge persisted into the twentieth century, but the reasons behind it remained obscure. Good coaches pondered it.

Coaches like Sal loved to talk about what distinguished practice players (the failed runner with the best foot speed or the failed warrior with the greatest strength) from gamers. They knew that winning depended on identifying and developing gamers, and they tried intuitive ways to do it. They might run punishing preseason practices in the summer heat, counting on the practice players to quit and the gamers to identify themselves by their tenacity. They might try pep talks. They might paper their locker rooms with messages about hard work and dedication.

Striving to be exceptional is never easy. But when people tell me that what I’m suggesting they do won’t be easy, I just say, “You’re right!” Going after big ideas takes sweat. It takes persistence, patience, and a bedrock belief in yourself. Not everyone will do it. That’s why we call it trying to be exceptional.

I never, by the way, try to define “exceptional” for a client. For some of the people I work with, it may be defined by championships won. For others, it may be defined by money earned and the things that money can buy. For some people, it might be defined by a helping career in which they save souls or teach impoverished kids. I don’t care what a person’s dreams are. I care about how a person lives his life.

I care about whether a person refuses to place limits on himself and instead chases greatness. If a golfer tells me that his goal is maintaining his playing privileges by finishing in the top 125 on the PGA Tour, I’ll challenge him. “Who are the one h...

If he wants to be a teacher, I don’t want to hear that he aspires to get tenure, punch a clock for three decades, and retire in modest comfort. I want to hear that he has a passion to use his life and his talents giving hundreds, or thousands, of kids a better start in life. I want to help people like that.

Whatever a person’s aspirations might be, these qualities and these ways of thinking will support those aspirations. They’ll help him keep his commitments and persist in working to improve. They’ll help her come through in the clutch and overcome setbacks. They’ll help him respond effectively to competition. They’re not a mystery. They’re not something that’s either in your genes or not in your genes, like blue eyes. They can be learned.

I don’t mean that my mother and father, in the manner of some of today’s parents, ever worried about my self-esteem. They didn’t. They didn’t praise me unless I did something praiseworthy. To the contrary, if I did less than my best at something, I got no credit for making a halfhearted effort.

He insisted that we do as well as possible in school. That usually meant As, though if he was persuaded that we were doing our best in a subject that was difficult for us, he would tolerate a B. He never told us what to do with our lives. He just taught us that we could do anything we wanted if we got an education, set our minds to it, and did our best. I learned to believe that with hard work, you could be the best. That’s optimism.

One of the ways people learn to be optimistic is by seeking out role models who have achieved great things. If these role models are in some way similar to themselves, they can help instill optimism.

I can’t help but think that these parents are going to raise the sort of people who, whatever their dreams might have been at the age of fifteen, will by forty be people who just want to be safe and secure, who don’t want a boss telling them they can produce more and earn more. That’s the attitude that pessimism instills.

I don’t believe that people are born either optimistic or pessimistic, the way they’re born either right-handed or left-handed. Optimism is an attitude that people can choose to have.

Successful people I have worked with do it all the time. They choose optimism. Whatever happens to them, they find reason to be hopeful.

Optimism is often an act of faith, a belief in something that cannot be proven.

I’m not saying that optimism won those three major titles for Padraig. He won them because he has talent and he worked very hard for many years to hone that talent. But Padraig’s optimism helped him find the will to keep working through all the setbacks he had—and a golfer loses far more tournaments than he wins. His is a constant kind of optimism, and it works for him the way fertilizer works for flowers, enabling and enhancing all the efforts he makes to improve his game.

People like Padraig either consciously or unconsciously find ways to become and stay optimistic. Regardless of what happens to them in life—from the circumstances of their birth to a setback in a golf tournament—they find something hopeful. They find a reason to keep believing in themsel...

That sort of situational optimism works particularly well when it’s applied to motor skills like shooting a basketball or putting a golf ball. As I’ve said, shooting and putting are skills that, once learned, are best left to the subconscious part of the brain. Somewhere in that portion of your mind lie the places that most efficiently control learned body movements. When we’re optimistic, we tend to let those subconscious brain elements do their work.

The opposite of this sort of situational optimism is an attitude of fear, concern, and doubt. In a word, pessimism. Pessimism tends to rouse the conscious brain and get it engaged.

I like anyone who’s performing to have an optimistic attitude, because performances go best when the performer trusts her skills and lets the performance flow.

One tip I’ve shared with many golfers is a simple one: smile a little bit before each putt. Frowning is something your body does automatically when you’ve engaged your conscious mind to concentrate on a problem. Smiling tends to be something your body does when you’re relaxed and happy and your subconscious brain is in control.

One way both teams and individuals can help themselves to an optimistic frame of mind is visualization. Visualization is a kind...

Optimism doesn’t guarantee anything in sports. It just improves your chances. I liken it to the impact knowledgeable card-counting has on blackjack. If a player can count and keep track of the face cards and tens that are played, he can improve his chances of winning money. But he can’t guarantee that when he pushes a big stack of chips onto the table, the dealer won’t deal himself a twenty-one and beat him.

While the correlation between optimism and success is imperfect, there is an almost perfect correlation between negative thinking and failure.

I have had many clients who tell me that while they believe some people are by nature optimistic, they are by nature the glass-half-empty kind. My reply to that is, “Okay. Are you only going to tackle the challenges that are easy for you?”

the first thing you have to do is decide that being optimistic is important to you, because you understand that optimism is essential to fulfilling your dreams and attaining your goals. Once you make that decision, you have to start looking at things from a different perspective.

Misfortune happens to everyone. Champions just refuse to let it push them into doubtful, fearful thinking.

I understand that everyone, including champions, has occasional doubts. No one should be upset if doubt occasionally enters his mind. But whether they are golfers or people in other endeavors, individuals who achieve durable, frequent success are optimists. They shake off their doubts and know in their heads and in their hearts that in the long run, they are going to be successful, they’re going to have great careers, everything will fall into place, and wonderful things will happen to them—if they keep doing the right stuff.

“People tend to become what they think about themselves.” There is enormous wisdom in that sentence. And there’s enormous hope. James was wise enough to see that we are each the biggest influence on our own destiny. More importantly, he understood that we each have the power to construct our own self-image and that the self-image we construct will very likely determine what we become in life.

Exceptional people choose to think about themselves in ways that contribute to their success. Put another way, they choose to construct confident self-images.

Confidence and optimism are closely related, but they’re different. I define optimism as a general faith that things will turn out well if an individual applies himself. Confidence is more specific. It usually applies to a particular skill or set of skills.

Most people have trouble with the idea that an individual can choose to be confident. They think that confidence is something an individual acquires only by succeeding at something.

In truth, very few people have that sort of early success. Yet many people become confident. That’s because a good portion of the trait we call confidence resides in the subconscious parts of the brain. Our subconscious is very susceptible to suggestion.

Your subconscious monitors all the thoughts you have about yourself, and it does so uncritically. If your conscious mind thinks, “I’m a very good salesman because people like me,” your subconscious doesn’t evaluate, deconstruct, or analyze. It simply records. It accommodates the input you’ve provided.