Trevor Moawad Quotes

It takes a plan to achieve anything of value. When you plan, you identify an end goal and then chart out neutral behaviors that can help you reach that goal.

You can do what you feel, or you can do what you choose.

Stop saying stupid shit out loud.

Accepting false hope as a coping strategy only sets us up for a longer fall.

When the strongest, smartest people face the toughest challenges of their lives, their instinct is to think neutrally.

We attack and DOMINATE in all areas of our lives consistently. We lead by example and understand that preparation is the key to our success.

STARVE YOUR DISTRACTIONS/FEED YOUR FOCUS.

The most dangerous bias when discussing performance is our innate privileging of the past. We elevate the past. We give it too much importance. We serve the past when we should be giving it a wide berth.

Lastly, to my father, thank you for the life you lived and the example you set for me. I love you. I close with one of your famous teachings. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it said better. “The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours—it is an amazing journey—and you alone are responsible for the quality of it.” —Trevor Moawad

The next time life presents you with a challenge, don’t simply assume everything will work out. Don’t tell yourself you can’t do it. Just evaluate the situation. Figure out what you can accomplish right now. Then draw your line. When you cross that line, draw another one. And keep going. There

In our house, we always say, “Pressure is a privilege.

first you form your habits, then they form you.

Stepping back after losses—either in sports or in life—is critical. A football team watches the tape. So can you.

I have no doubts that the best is ahead.

We have more power over ourselves than anyone else does.

He responded with a classic SEAL way of looking at adversity: in the middle of a period of adversity, we have an opportunity to stress-test our own belief system.

I already possessed the tools to navigate the time ahead, even under the most brutally difficult circumstances.

do

What happened happened. Okay. Fine. What happens next has nothing to do with that.

That’s neutral. Staying in the moment, giving each moment its own history, and reacting to events as they unfold. It takes away emotion and replaces it with behaviors. Instead of asking, “How do I feel?” you should be asking yourself, “What do I do?

What am I saying to myself? What am I saying to my teammates? What language am I using? How am I impacting myself? How am I impacting others? How am I being my best self every time I step on the field? It’s critical to have a fundamental mental plan.

And that is a critical factor to consider if you manage others. Just because something matters to you doesn’t necessarily mean it will matter as much to the people you manage. Lay out what matters most to the organization, and then help the employees build a value system within that architecture that allows them to feel invested as well.

There is no choice. It takes what it takes.

The ability to sell to others is incredibly valuable, but it isn’t as valuable as the ability to sell to yourself.

next. My dad called this imprinting. In the 1980s he’d have NASA leaders, IBM executives, educators, and athletes write down specific memories of strong performances on note cards and put a plan in place to review and relive them. He understood that words trigger pictures, which impact emotions, which lead to performances. He’d teach me this process as flick back/flick up—flick back to a past moment, and then flick up and apply that past behavior to a future moment.

Sometimes it’s easier to not do something than it is to do something.

If it doesn’t play out how we want it to tomorrow, what would stop it?

Those were the facts at that moment. Bob Moawad was teaching neutral thinking years before his son put a name to it.

He wanted everyone to learn to think neutrally. He wanted us to celebrate that we’re vertical and on this side of the carpet. He wanted us to stop worrying about the final score and just try to dominate every precious second we get on this planet.

To make it through a pandemic, we all needed to live neutrally.

Why not just be positive? When I speak to groups, a common question I get is “Why do you bash positive thinking?” I’m not bashing positive thinking by promoting neutral thinking. Sometimes positive thinking is just . . . impossible

The people who chose to believe that because they believed positivity would help eliminate the virus wound up being crushed the most when it became clear that none of that stuff was true. Those people wound up more negative and more depressed because positive thinking failed them.

Neutral thinking forces us to seek the truth. But it doesn’t require us to render an opinion.

Other motivational systems encourage illusion or self-delusion. I never will.

Did we alter our shooting stroke slightly? Are we allowing other concerns to distract us while we shoot? This information matters so much more than “I suck” or “I’m on fire.

No matter the topic, negative memories and negative experiences affected people more deeply than their positive counterparts. “We have found bad to be stronger than good in a disappointingly relentless pattern,” the study’s authors concluded.

every athlete’s toughest competitor: negativity. It seeds self-doubt, fear, anxiety, cautiousness, and hopelessness.

As the years progressed, I stopped discussing positivity with the Jacksonville Jaguars or US soccer players or NFL draft trainees and focused on simpler tenets such as habit formation, behavior interpretation, goal direction, and conscious competency. There is a term for this: anthropomaximology. It started with the Soviet Union’s Olympic machine in the 1970s.

Anthropomaximology has evolved to mean the study of high achievers in any field, and it absolutely helps when trying to identify and build excellent habits.

But he refused to let the long odds drain the life from him. He worked right through chemo. He pushed himself to recover from surgeries. He rolled into radiation focused only on the next step in the process.

There comes a point where being neutral is the only option. You have to go to that place, because otherwise it’s impossible to get clarity and calm things down. I love the idea of taking a moment to pause and then going to neutral.

there’s never been a statue of a critic.

As long as I am able to execute my vision and feel really good about my art and my process, that’s all I need. That’s all there needs to be. If you’re worried about what someone else has to say, it sends you all over the place.

Like preparing a team to make a Super Bowl run or to win an NBA title, we’d need to go through the process.

I kept reminding myself to deal with information as it was distributed to me. This is a critical component of neutral thinking.

The teaching platform could actually focus more on what the audience didn’t do, didn’t say, and didn’t consume as opposed to a list of burdensome mainstays in peak performance world like positive affirmations, positive quotes, or the newly emerging mindfulness industry. It’s an easy first step—or easier one—to NOT do something. Within Alabama football, which has won six national titles since Saban arrived, we identified a need to eliminate negative self-talk early in the process.

I’ve refined that message into the kind of advice that will resonate with a nineteen-year-old football star: Stop saying stupid shit out loud.

I needed a way to combine the idea of flushing negativity with creating good behaviors, because those things truly are linked.

We had gotten players to stop staying negative things out loud, and then Nick had done an amazing job of creating an environment where players didn’t think about championships or getting picked in the first round. He had convinced all these eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old stud athletes to focus exclusively on the task at hand. That

Coaches never talked about winning the national championship. It was understood that such rewards would come if Crimson Tide players could win enough individual moments.

One of Nick’s superpowers is an understanding that not everyone hears the same message the same way.

Nick not only gets them to take a season one game at a time; he convinces them to take their entire lives one moment at a time.

It needed to be easily understood by anyone. It also needed to emphasize the kind of inner peace that can come from shutting out negativity, avoiding unearned positivity, and getting to the truth.

Trevor always taught the athletes he worked with to go to the truth.

Like his former boss Nick Saban, he didn’t believe in looking at the scoreboard.

Positive thinking isn’t the most effective antidote to negativity. Neutral thinking is.

It’s a method of making decisions that requires us to strip away our biases and focus on facts. It allows us to make decisions in a judgment-free manner that accepts what has happened in the past with an understanding that what happened before doesn’t guarantee what will happen next.

If we accept that the future isn’t predetermined by the events of the past, we can dig deeper and understand that we can influence what happens next with our behaviors.

The difference between thinking neutrally and being blindly positive is that you’re going to ground your goals in facts, and you’re going to create a set of achievable criteria along the way.

The only thing worse than thinking negatively is speaking negatively. When you verbalize that negative thought, it multiplies its effect.

Here’s what we have left and here’s how much time we have” allows for a lot more productive goal-setting than “We’ll never finish” ever could.

So I’ll say to you the same thing we taught all those football players: Stop saying stupid shit out loud.

To truly live neutrally, we have to be able to evaluate ourselves honestly.

Injury is its way of protecting you and telling you to change something.

Ask myself the most fundamental and powerful question: What is it that I want?

The pressure might make you reach out to people you were scared to approach before. It might embolden you to try something you never would have before. It might lead you to a better situation if you steer into the pressure instead of away from it.

How am I impacting myself? How am I impacting others? How am I being my best self every time I step on the field? What’s the story we want to tell? How are we going to write that story?

By 2017, I had incorporated the idea of neutral thinking into everything I taught. I had found something that took people away from negative but gave them something more useful than positive.

Russell was asked in the postgame press conference how he managed to bounce back from the interception. His answer: he didn’t need to bounce back because he never let himself bounce away in the first place.

Just being able to remain neutral allows me to just focus on the next play, the next moment.

Neutral thinking asks you to set emotion aside when you make decisions, but once you’ve made those decisions, I want you to live passionately.

It’s okay to have emotions,” he said, “but don’t be emotional.

In other words, let the facts guide your decisions.

Russell asks himself two questions: What is the next step? How do I do this right here and right now?

But it’s what’s next that matters, not what was. What’s next is the only thing you can still influence.

Life rewards those who start.

Greatness is available to anyone—including your opponents—and the pressure is on you to snatch it first.

It’s hard to feel our way into achieving a damn thing.

It’s about creating the opportunity to win by behaving like people who win.

Do you need to adjust what you value? Or do you need to adjust your behavior?

If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day,” McRaven told the graduates. “It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.

Once you’ve catalogued your values and you know what matters to you, you can examine your habits. If you believe you value fitness and yet your habits don’t include regular exercise, do you really value fitness?

fitness? Or do you need to change your habits so they align with your values?

Living neutrally isn’t a philosophy. It’s a course of action. So it requires action.

action. It requires you to decide you want to embrace the behaviors that allow you to live in line with your values.

The “All The Time” part is what matters most. Your behaviors define who you are in real time. If you want to live your values, to reach your goals, you have to execute the behaviors to match all the time. Not a few hours a day. Not a few days a week. All. The. Time.

Habits are the actions we take to turn something possible into something probable.

As you can see from these examples, the key is to focus on that next step and not the big picture. The pandemic proved the importance of this concept because, at first, we couldn’t even conceive of how big the big picture actually was.

Thinking about it could emotionally cripple us because of the overwhelming negativity. Positivity for the sake of positivity was even more dangerous, in some cases. We had to downshift or risk spiraling into the darkest of places.

What do you need from me to execute?

The next time your world feels like it’s collapsing around you, grab your mental gearshift and ask yourself something similar. Don’t worry about the big picture. Ask this: What is the next thing I need to do?

Si is always on the lookout for lessons from the sports world that he can bring to his business. For him, the psychology of sports and the psychology of entrepreneurship are one and the same.

downshift to neutral and live there.

Neutral was the only acceptable option. Given the dire circumstances, there wasn’t a way to be positive. But neutral can become a lifeline creating hope in a practical way.

The idea that you must be positive to have hope is bullshit.

Against the C-word, hope is a weapon. The same is true when a virus is rampaging across the world and your company has to stand between it and your customers.

In that first all-hands meeting, Si told his employees how to stay neutral. He told them to focus only on what they could control. He reminded them that they couldn’t control every outcome. He told them to stop reading and watching the news if they wanted to avoid negativity. “Watch it for entertainment if you want,” he said, “but the company has better information, and it will be shared with the employees.” Si also told his employees not to rely on positivity either. This was going to be difficult and that was okay. Si and his staff began giving the entire team a daily checklist. Read the plan of the day. Execute your assignment. Take care of your family. Once everyone had downshifted, then it was time to figure out what to do next. For Si’s company, that was a temporary change in

In that first all-hands meeting, Si told his employees how to stay neutral. He told them to focus only on what they could control. He reminded them that they couldn’t control every outcome. He told them to stop reading and watching the news if they wanted to avoid negativity. “Watch it for entertainment if you want,” he said, “but the company has better information, and it will be shared with the employees.

Si and his staff began giving the entire team a daily checklist. Read the plan of the day. Execute your assignment. Take care of your family.

They kept repeating the same mantra: We’re going to do the best we can today.