Overcoming Stress, Stagnation & Burnout - Alan Stein Jr

Are you a high performer because of your habits or are you a high performer in spite of your habits? I mean, in every industry, there are people that are so riddled with natural talent that they can get away with mediocre work habits and still be at the top of their field. But they're not the best that they're capable of becoming, and that's the yardstick that we want to make sure that we're measuring everything with. (airplane whooshing)

Alan Stein Jr., welcome to the show.

Oh, it's so great to be with you.

How would you describe your background, all of the stuff that you've done in your history to bring you up to this point?

Well, I've really had two parts to a professional career, and the, the first half of that was as a basketball performance coach. Uh, and for 15 years, my number one objective was to help elite level players improve their athleticism and bulletproof their bodies on the court. And then five years ago, I made a very distinct pivot, uh, pun very much intended, uh, over to the corporate space as a keynote speaker and author, uh, where I translate, uh, the lessons and the strategies and the disciplines that I, I learned from the world's best basketball players. I show folks how to apply those to their lives and their businesses.

Who were you working with back in the day?

So my main area of expertise was at the high school level, and I'm a, a Washington DC resident, and I was able to work at two different high schools here that have produced over a dozen players currently in the NBA. Uh, the most notable of which is Kevin Durant. So I had a chance to work with Kevin Durant, uh, when he was 15 years old and got a peek behind the curtain of what it takes to ascend to the top of the mountain, uh, and be world-class at your craft. Uh, and that actually led to work with Jordan Brand, uh, Nike Basketball, USA Basketball. And I got an opportunity to work events for already established players like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Stephen Curry, Chris Paul. And I got to see the other side of the curtain of what it takes to actually sustain high performance and excellence once you've already reached that mountaintop.

It's an interesting discussion because a lot of conversations that I used to have maybe four or five years ago were about getting from that zero to 50 stage. It was about focusing on basic skill acquisition, habit building, life hacks, stuff like that, routines. And increasingly now, the conversations I'm having seem to be more about sustaining that performance over time, iterating, avoiding burnout, avoiding stress, understanding when it's time to move to a slightly different angle, whether, whether you should continue doing the thing that you're doing, how to find mentors, how to be a mentor. Um, and that seems to be a little bit more of a rare conversation, I think. You know, the vast majority of people by definition are trying to get to the middle 50% of excellence in whatever field. There's... As you begin to ascend up and up and up, there are fewer and fewer people trying to do that, so there's less of a market to market that to.