Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to neutral thinking, how to break the pattern of negative thinking with Trevor Moood. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy.
When I was young and I was 18 years old and I dropped out of college and I was diagnosed with an initial diagnosis of cancer and it turned out to be shingles and a number of other things, I did start to understand quickly that, well, I don't know if positive thinking works all the time and that the data is anecdotal. I do know that negative thinking does work and it works negatively.
And one of the things is I would start at Alabama and I would start with the Jacksonville Jaguars and I would start with the Miami Dolphins. I started to realize and even looking back to a young age that nobody wants to be told to be positive. The positive thinking is probably the number one reason this industry has not grown in my 44 years of living.
positive thinking in many cases repulses people. You're telling me to be positive and I'm going through a divorce. You're telling me to be positive and I threw three interceptions. You're telling me to be positive and I got to deal with this president. You're telling me to be positive and I got this current situation. You're telling me to be positive and I got this health situation. So then what's the alternative? Well, the alternative has always been negative.
So when we would get to the University of Alabama, you have this finite window of time. How long could you influence? Everything comes down to influence. Would you agree? Whether it's your family, your kids, whatever the circumstance or the situations. So the NCAA gives you 22 hours to influence your players over a week. And so when you look at the human performance, you look at nutrition, you look at strength and conditioning, you look at fatigue signs, you look at all these different things.
Coach Saban believed that there had to be some emphasis on psychological education. And so how are we going to do that and how is it going to be efficient? Well, most people think of sports psychology as treating somebody who has a problem. Nick Saban didn't look at it that way. He looked at how do we make our best players better? How do we take great players and make them greater? And then how do we have an educational platform for all 120 players?
And a college football team is a business. It's 120 employees, and you lose 35% of those employees every year. And it's an e-bit-a-driven business where when you succeed, you get more sponsorship. And as you get more sponsorship, you make more money. And as you make more money, the school makes more money, and everybody benefits. And it all happens from winning.
But if your best players leave every year in that 35% and they take their great behaviors and their great habits and their great mindset with them, then you're in trouble. So you have to develop programatics. You have to develop a system. I mean, you look at quests and what you guys did that ultimately when you were going to sell it or you're going to evolve, that there had to be, if we're going to create the ultimate metabolic type of food or we're going to limit like the recipe has to be the same. So you're not the only one that can cook it.
So ultimately, psychologically, we had to come up with a plan for everybody. I think that learning how to meditate and regulate your breath is important. But to me, I think that's AP chemistry. And we need an eighth grade version where we just know, OK, that there's a table of elements. And we need the basics. And so that's what we did. When we started to study, what we learned was that negative thinking was the most powerful
element that our players were combating, that negative thinking was weaponizing them against them. So how's negativity carried? Well, is it your internal thoughts? Well, if you're dealing with trying to change internal thoughts, then you got to go to affirmations and you got to go to imagery, you got to go to visuals, very difficult skills. Well, we started to look at the externalization. Well, if somebody says something out loud, it's 10 times more powerful than if they think it.
And then as we started to study the data, particularly data that was just reinforced by Christine Porath from Georgetown and Harvard, that negativity is a multiple of four to seven times more powerful than positivity.
So think about that. If I say something out loud, it's 10x. If it's negative, it's four to seven times more powerful. So when I say negative things out loud, it's 40 to 70 times more likely that that will happen or cause a result that won't be good for me than if I just didn't say anything.
So as we were going into our second year at Alabama, we were going into our first year at Florida State, and we were ultimately going into our second year at the University of Georgia, we made a bet. What if we could just get our players to not say stupid things out loud?
What if we could just do that? Not teach any element of positive thinking, but eliminate conversations about the heat, complaining about coaches, complaining about circumstances, complaining about situations, verbalizing negativity. But we weren't going to lie to them and say, hey, be positive. We just taught them the data. And then what we did was some of the things that you noticed in the book, the stories in and around negativity are incredible.
So Billy Buckner, who just passed away recently, was an incredible eight-time gold glove, a great baseball player for the Boston Red Sox.
Well, he made a mistake in sports that would be one of the biggest sport bloopers in history. And in 1986, he let the game-winning run score on a ground ball through his legs that ultimately would give the Mets the World Series. Now, I was just watching an ESPN E60 Jeremy Schap story. And I saw an interview that was done in 1990, that resurfaced in 1995, where Buckner was interviewed 12 days before the World Series. And he said, you know, the dreams are to win.
You know, to win the World Series in the nightmare would be for me to let the game-winning run score on a ground ball through my legs. You know, and then ultimately that's exactly what would happen. Now, by saying that out loud, what did he do? He didn't make it happen, but he increased the probability.
And this is what I want people to understand. Your internal thoughts are all over the place. I think that what he did is a subconscious plant by verbalizing it and knowing that it's 10 times more powerful, he's planting it in a subconscious. He doesn't want it to happen, but it becomes something that's ultimately on his mind and he gave it more power by verbalizing it.
So, pistol Pete Marovitch, a basketball player, I'll give you two other examples, but he was interviewed at 26 years old and he said, you know, I don't want to play 10 years of pro basketball and die at the age of 40 of a heart attack. Well, he played 10 years of pro basketball and in Pasadena, California died of a heart attack at 40.
There's another great story that I saw from a magazine called Success Unlimited in 1973. A guy is hired to fix a refrigerated box car and back of a train. He goes into the train. He panics, gets himself locked inside the box car. So now he's pounding on the door. There's nothing to do. He starts to panic and thinks he's going to freeze to death.
He finds a pen. He starts writing down, Tom, what's going through his mind. And he writes down, I'm becoming colder. As people, one of the things we do to ourselves is observe and report. I'm not playing well. I'm having a bad day. We're having a bad quarter. My marriage isn't going well. We observe and report. Still colder now, he writes. Nothing to do but wait. Half asleep I could hardly write. Finally, he says, these might be my last words. And I'll show you the article. They open up the box car many hours later and they find him and he's dead.
But the temperature inside the box car was 56 degrees. The freezing apparatus was broken. There was plenty of air in the box car. There was no physical reason for his death. The best they could say is somehow he talked himself into dying. And as you know, the book covers the psychogenic death in and around the Korean War.
The Korean War, one third of all American POWs, died and they said that one of the things that was done in the POW camps was the negativity. They manufactured articles about the United States being bombed. They withheld all positivity. They didn't give them any mail. Believe it or not, there are like regulations for POW camps throughout the world.
And ultimately, they filled up these healthy American soldiers with all this doubt. A priest would end up calling it give up,itis and healthy American soldiers over a period of days would walk over to a corner, sit down and die of broken hearts. So negativity is the most powerful thing we're combating. Look at our politics today, a positive message versus a negative message. It's no chance.
When I think about being seven years old in the Tacoma Golf and Country Club and walking off the golf course and my dad, you know, everybody call him Mr. Positive and this and that. But in fairness to my dad, when he was raised and he was teaching, the only thing was positive and negative. So if you weren't negative, you had to be positive. But that just never made sense to me. And if we could just learn how to not be negative, how to not externalize negative, then ultimately that would help them more than ever trying to be told to be positive.
Well, if just if you follow the data and you say stupid shit out loud, ultimately you're predicting and perpetuating exactly what you don't want to have happen. And who's always in control of what Tom Billy-U says? You're always in control of what you say. People say, yeah, but I can't. The thinking everybody's fucked up in the thoughts. I've been with people the night before Super Bowl, the night before national championships, eight different times, where the doubt's there, but we're not externalizing it. And they don't have people say, well, what, do you want me to lie? I'm not telling you to lie.
I'm telling you that if you look at the information and you say, I don't want to be here today. I hate this job. God dang, or you look at Muhammad Senu, they're up 28-3 in the Super Bowl playing against Tom Brady and he looks at his friend and says, hey man, they still got Tom Brady on their side. There is no lead that's safe.
Well, fuck, why are you saying that? And you're almost predicting that that's what's going to happen. Now, ultimately, not saying stupid things out loud is you have to create an alternative. So I started thinking about a car. If a car's going backwards, it can't automatically go forward.
So it has to shift into neutral and then it stops. Then at that point, you can either go forward by changing your behavior or you can go backwards by doing the same stupid shit you were just doing. Neutral is truth-based thinking. What's the truth?
Okay? In 2010, you're running a data loss company, right? You've been doing it for eight years. You graduated from UFC film. It's not what you want to do. You're 60 pounds overweight. You lose your weight. You find two buddies and you say, hey man, we're going to go into my kitchen. We're going to find a way to create a product that's going to be different than anything anybody knows. The simple fact of the matter is the past is real.
Okay? So the only thing that makes it predictive is if my behavior stays the same. So I'll give you a great story. So we both grew up in Tacoma and there used to be a thing called Toastmasters. I don't know if you remember Toastmasters but Toastmasters was a local regional and national speaking group for anybody that wanted to get better at speaking.
Well, my dad had gone to a Toastmasters early on and heard one of the most successful magazine entrepreneurs in the world speak. He comes back and tells me, I just had a chance to hear one of the most successful magazine entrepreneurs in the world speak. And he said, when are you taking your SATs? I'm taking it next year. He said, well, this guy was failing out of high school. He was struggling. He was raised by a single mom in the Midwest. But he promised his mother he would take a test called the SAT.
So he takes the SAT in May, his junior year, doesn't expect anything, gets a score back in June, now the SAT, which I don't know how many your population know, but it's a standardized test with a math part and a verbal part, both are scored out at 800 points. Well this guy takes it, he's bombing, he's failing out of school, he doesn't expect anything as he's telling the story of Toastmasters. Well he gets a 1480 out of 1600.
So he's stunned, right? That would be for the smart people that listen to your podcast. In the same, yeah. Right, cognitive dissonance. I got a 900 on my SATs, just to give people a frame. Right, and I got a 10-10. And I got a 10-10, right? I was just, hey, four days, it was a miracle, right? But it's a hard test, and it's a variety of different things. So he gets the score, and his mother, doing what any mother would do, knowing her kid, says, did you cheat?
Right? She knows her son. And he says, I swear to God, I tried to cheat, but the way the numbers were and the scantrons and the bubbles you couldn't cheat. So she says, you mean to tell me you really got that score? He said, yeah, I got the score. So he's done, Tom. So as my dad's telling me this story, I'm like, OK. So he says, all right, so what he decides is because he realizes he's smart and he's going into a senior year. He says, I'm going to go to class. Now he starts to go to class. He doesn't hang out with who he did when he didn't go to class.
All right, teacher seemed in class and they said, hey, maybe Franklin Pierce, maybe we missed the boat on this kid. So they start to treat him differently. Well, as the guy would tell the story, he graduates, goes to a community college, goes on to Wichita State, goes on to the Ivy League, and becomes this massively successful magazine entrepreneur. So I said, OK, well, the guy was always smart. He just needed a standardized test to unlock it. My dad said, no, that's not the story. And this is what I want you to understand.
He said, 12 years after all this guy's success, he gets a letter in the mail from Princeton, New Jersey. Doesn't think anything about it. The next day his wife says you're going to open it. He opens it. True story turns out the SAT board will periodically review their test-taking procedures and the policies. The year he took the test, he was one of 13 people sent the wrong SAT score. His actual score was a 740 out of 1600.
And he said, people think, my whole life changed when I got to 1480. But what happened? My whole life changed when I started acting like a 1480. And what does a 1480 do? He goes to class. Well, this is one of the first stories I would share when I had my opportunity at Alabama or Florida State or Georgia. So A, your language is powerful. But number two, your behavior is way ahead of your success.
And so many people let their feelings dictate what they do as opposed to throw your behavior out there. Russell Wilson's 5'10". He shouldn't be playing pro football but he behaves like the best quarterback in the country and he's done that since before he was at that level and then his feelings and emotions and his skill caught up to that behavior.
I think the lesson my dad was trying to teach me ultimately was in addition to my language, what I do, not how I feel about my past, is going to determine who I am in the future. And that's what I think neutral thinking is. And I think neutral thinking isn't just thinking. I think it's behavior. And I think it's language. And so your behavior is what's going to change you. But you also have to start by asking yourself, what do I want? And why do I want it? Why don't I have it?
You know, what am I willing to do to get it? And I do think, in terms of listening to one of your earlier podcasts, I do think there's value in writing things down, but in a really simple way. I've learned probably the most things through the best athletes in the world, and Michael Johnson, who had the gold shoes. I'll never forget Drew Brees were training for the NFL Combine in 2001. There's 18 guys. Michael just finished winning his fourth gold medal.
And he comes in and he's just a badass dude. Fastest man alive at that point. He had just run the 43-18. And then when he ran the 19-3, it was 26 miles per hour. The fastest 50 to 150, he ran 9-1 flat. So all these athletes were in awe of Michael. And I think Drew at the time says, hey man, do you set goals?
He said, yeah, he said, where do you learn? He said, what do you mean what I learned? He said, where do you learn like, do you learn in college? I didn't learn in college. He said, did you learn like smart goals? Like what the fuck are smart goals? You know, and smart goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and with the timeframe. Michael said, when I would go into Safeway,
I recognized that if I walked into Safeway and I wrote eight things down, I would walk into Safeway and I'd walk out of Safeway in five minutes. If I walked into Safeway and had nothing written down, I would be in there for 20 minutes and I'd find myself on aisle eight and I'd be anxious and I'd be nervous and I'd be, why am I looking at the weak ends and the hoe hoes when I know I don't need any of those things? And he said, so because I wrote it down in Safeway and it worked, I figured why would I be any different about my athletic career?
And I think that that's the level that we need to educate people. I hope it takes what it takes, basically, is an introduction to self-help. That when I look at mindfulness being the brand and headspace being a billion dollar valuation, and I sit there and think,
at 44 years old and growing up in this my whole life, the only time I can meditate is at the end of church. It's such a challenging skill and is it important? Absolutely it's important. Do our affirmations important? Absolutely they're important. Are changing from the inside out important? Yes, but they're not the starting points. Don't say stupid shit out loud. Be mindful of what you consume. If I watch three minutes of news that increases my probability by 27%, I'm gonna say I had a shitty day.
Right? When I was going through a divorce, I had a lawsuit, I had some health challenges, all these different types of things. If I'm listening to Jake Owen or Sam Hunt, I love New Country. But New Country makes me just want to go run and jump off a cliff. You know, it makes me think I'm never going to meet another girl ever again in my life, which I hope is not true.
You know, and so what are the things that are in our control? What we watch when we get home? What we listen to when we're in our car? Who we talk to when we get on our cell phone? And what we say out loud always as we speak. And I think that those are the powerful things and ultimately our behavior is what's going to define our success. My dad's belief was when you become helpless, you become hopeless.
And when I feel like I can control my behavior, when I feel like I'm in control of, even if I'm going through cancer, even if I'm going through a difficult challenge, even if I'm going through a re-organ of business, you know, if I still feel like, okay, this is not optimal, but there's something I can do, then I'm helpful to myself. And when I'm helpful, I'm hopeful. And when I'm helpless, I'm hopeless. So my dad's belief always was to make hope a habit.
and that hope was the most powerful medicine that we all have. And then I think we have to believe that we can influence our future. You know, we've got to believe, I believe that no matter what I'm facing, I can influence my future. That just because my first marriage didn't work, that doesn't mean my second marriage won't. But it's incumbent upon me to be better, right? And that's where if I'm spending time, well, she didn't do this, she didn't do, there's nothing I can do about that.
Right? But that's true. And that's where you're talking about, well, the past feels predictive. Right? Well, I thought, you know, hey, what are you going to do to be different going forward? But so many people think the self-help industry is about things you do. I think one of the things that makes athletes so incredible is what they're willing not to do. What they're willing not to say.
what they're willing not to eat, what they're willing not to consume, what they're willing not to watch. That's what makes, think about, it's January 2020, what are five things you cannot do right now that will instantly make your life better? I was, you know, obviously I've worked in the sports world for a long time and my first NBA team was the Memphis Grizzlies.
And guys love college football. And Vince Carter, who's 42 now, same age as Tom Brady, and still playing in the NBA, plays for Atlanta. Vince was about 37 at the time.
And we had just had three players arrested at one of the programs I was headed to in one night. Like we hit our quota for a night. And Vince and I were talking, he loved college football. And he said, how many of those guys traveling to play in the NFL? And I said, probably seven out of 10. And he said, isn't it crazy? They think they can do whatever they want and still make it to that level.
I said, what do you mean? He said, I'm 37. I'm still playing in the NBA. You think I can do whatever I want? I said, what do you mean? Yeah, I do think you can. He said, no, my choices are finite. I said, what do you mean? Like, choice is an illusion? He said, choice is absolutely an illusion.
There's a set of behaviors that I do that allow me to play at 37. I can't slam dunk the ball now. Yes, I can still slam dunk, but if I slam dunk, it takes its toll on my knees, and I can't get back and play defense fast enough. So when I get down, I lay the ball up more times than not. I don't eat fast food after games. I lift weight every day of games. And I said, so choice is an illusion. He said, yeah. And I ended up going at that point. He was heading over to the University of Alabama.
and we sort of coined the idea of the illusion of choice. There are no choices. When you decided you wanted to build, you didn't decide you wanted to build a billion dollar empire, but you decided you wanted to make a different type of nutritional bar, correct? Did you start with the bar?
And so there was either gonna be a way that you did it or there was gonna be the way, and there was gonna be a way that tasted just like muscle milk, or there was gonna be a way that was gonna be different. And you either did it or you didn't, correct? And you were either gonna commit the time, and I'm just using you as an example, but if I wanna have a good relationship, I saw a statistic that said the average married couple talks 27 minutes a week. I was talking to some of my buddies about there, and they're like, that much? What did I find all the time?
But that's obviously not a good statistic. Well, are you born with the gift to make time for people? No, it's a behavior. So to me, the illusion of choice is thinking you can have a good marriage and talk 27 minutes a week. So you have to make time
in order to talk. And maybe you're on the road, you travel a lot, turning your TV off when you're on the road, doing simple better, turning the TV off, turning the light off and just engaging in a conversation. You know, if you're engaging with your kids, there's a way to do it and there's a way not to do it. Thinking you have an infinite amount of choices is idiotic. And this generation right now, generation Z and generation Y, both think they can do whatever the fuck they wanna do.
and still achieve things. You can achieve whatever you want to do in many cases if you're willing to get behind the behaviors that drive that success. But it won't be anything. Pete Carroll for the Seahawks, he'll let you go to bed at five in the morning if you want, as long as you can perform to a 9.5 standard when you get there. Okay? Well, what you're going to figure out is you can't go to bed at five in the morning.
Okay? So you're going to have to adapt your behavior to get an alignment with winning behaviors. So the illusion of choice is this fact that there are not an infinite amount of choices. There may be options. I can get pasta instead of a cheeseburger.
But even if I want to maintain a diet or maintain optimal health, then I have to limit how much calorie intake, what type of foods. When I first lost weight, I didn't understand that Gatorade had 800 calories in it. You know when you drink those four Gatorades, even though all you're eating is lunchables, you're actually driving all these calories and it's just, am I doing simple better?
