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.

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.

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.

I have no doubts that the best is ahead.

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

STARVE YOUR DISTRACTIONS/FEED YOUR FOCUS.

We have more power over ourselves than anyone else does.

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

Stop saying stupid shit out loud.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

To be aware of the past. Grounded in the present. In control of the next behavior.

do

There is no choice. It takes what it takes.

The simple truth is you have all their grit, toughness, and ability to cut through the bullshit. Thank you for your neutral approach, and for your tremendous skill doing your job at an elite level.

You never really know what is going to cause the breakthrough. Each situation has its own history and circumstances. But when they get it, it’s like a brake being released. They reach maximum velocity quickly.

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.

The Illusion of Choice” — A lot of times we feel as if we have choices to make about where we want to go and WHAT IT TAKES to get there. — The REALITY is that what it takes to succeed is not REALLY a choice. — WE GET tired of talking about it. — I get tired of talking about it. — I know we all do—but we are going to talk about it until we RESOLVE it. — ANYONE who runs a marathon will tell you that miles twenty to twenty-six are the hardest. — AND ANYONE who quits running at mile twenty-two will tell you that they immediately felt better—and IT’S TRUE. But days later when they read about the people who finished ahead of them—who kept running—they will have instant regret. — MY point is that THE ONLY CHOICE YOU HAD was to come to this school. — ONCE you chose that, you said, “I’M GOING TO BE ELITE.” — If that’s true, then the FORMULA is the FORMULA. — YEARS from now when they look back at this ALABAMA team, all that WILL BE LEFT is WHAT WE DID. — NOT what WE COULD HAVE DONE, if only this or this happened. — IF we are ELITE—IF we are a team who BELIEVES BIG—then WE DON’T have a “choice” about how we finish this SPRING. — NONE. — THIS game rewards people who DO IT RIGHT. — THIS game has demands—YOU DO them and succeed or YOU DON’T do them and you struggle. THERE is no middle area. — MY point is we don’t “have a choice” about how we are going to do things if we are going to STAY TRUE to the goals WE ALL made to start this year.

Thinking about all 26.2 miles is overwhelming. Thinking about the next few steps is manageable,

Neutral thinking forces us to seek the truth. But it doesn’t require us to render an opinion. If we missed ten shots in a row, it doesn’t mean we stink at shooting a basketball. If we made ten shots in a row, it doesn’t necessarily mean we are great at shooting a basketball. It means we need to comb through our personal shooting data to understand why we might have missed or made those shots.

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.

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

Mel and his defensive line coach are going to examine all those plays when the player didn’t keep containment and try to figure out why.

Life rewards those who start.

The top performer at your company probably also lives this way. Their real mission and true purpose? Living in alignment with their visions and being driven to fulfill them. They are defined by their own behaviors, not by anyone else’s opinion of them. That quality, that ability to determine one’s own true north, is something that unites successful people across every sport, industry, and military unit I’ve ever seen.

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.

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.

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.

What’s the next right step? It’s the decision you make once you’ve downshifted to neutral and examined all the facts without judgment.

Wooden was the ultimate neutral thinker.

John Wooden never wanted his players to think about the scoreboard.

Northwestern doesn’t sign the highest-rated recruits, but coach Pat Fitzgerald—a proud Northwestern alum—has worked at the school since 2001. He knows exactly what kind of players will fit in on the field and in the locker room. The Wildcats have spent most of this century building a program where the older players teach the younger ones the next right step, and that’s why they routinely outplay expectations.

Execution may matter more depending on the event, but correctly identifying that next step is the best predictor of success.

What he taught remains beloved and respected because it is universal.

But he downshifted to neutral. He chose the next right step.

We all need to make sure we live in line with our own values because that’s the only way to truly stay neutral.

If we’re out of alignment, our decisions and our behaviors won’t feel correct in our minds. They won’t help us reach our goals.

We are often guided by what we believe to be true, and that doesn’t always match what actually is true.

Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, and many of the coaches who have worked for him, embrace a concept called “Tell the Truth Monday.

If we bombard ourselves with facts, our delusions get buried.

Our values are what we consider the cornerstones of ourselves. We set goals to make sure we live up to our values. We form habits to ensure we reach our goals. When all of these align, we succeed.

When we fail, we can examine our values, goals, and habits to determine where along the line we faltered.

Then we can fix the issue because we have all that information and we understand how to use it.

First and foremost, we all instinctively crave being part of a group that shares our values and helps us live in line with them.

My C-word diagnosis was, in many ways, crushing for me, but limiting who I called and avoiding doom-scrolling on the internet helped me manage the immediate mental chaos.

Later, we included more concrete concepts that also could be defined as program values. These veered more toward the habits we hoped the players could develop to live aligned with the more abstract values. The concepts on this list also mattered deeply to the head coach, and they would come to matter deeply to the players: Relaxation Sleep Time Management

By my last year at Alabama in 2015, it was the older players—not the coaches—who usually explained the program’s values to the younger ones. The veterans enforced the value system and made sure everyone lived up to it.

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.

That question Lindsey Corsaro asked of her teammates is the precise question we should all ask ourselves once we’ve downshifted to neutral. What does this situation require of me?

Mel wants to build that in East Lansing. The Wildcats have great habits, and Mel hopes the Spartans will also after they’ve played in his program for a while. “If you want to be good, there are certain things you have to do day in and day out,” Mel said. “There are very few choices.” He even used the phrase “the illusion of choice.

Mel thought back to a section of It Takes What It Takes that describes the levels of competence. You probably were taught that those levels look like this. Unconscious incompetence: You don’t know that you don’t know how to succeed. Conscious incompetence: You know you don’t know how to succeed. Conscious competence: You’re succeeding, but you have to concentrate hard to perform your task correctly. Unconscious competence: You’ve completed the task so many times you can do it successfully without even thinking about it.

It can’t work that way in the sports world because success requires so much conscious repetition. So the last two categories look like this in the world of living neutrally: Unconscious competence: You can succeed, but you aren’t entirely sure why you’re successful when you are. Conscious competence: You know the steps required for success, and you can repeat them. As

Top performers, of course, have God-given talent. But so do other people. The people who ascend to the highest level usually do so because they’re willing to do the basics better than everyone else—again and again and again.

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.

What do you need from me to execute?

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.

I reminded the players that knowing what mattered to them is the first step.

It requires employees to continuously ask, “How can we be better?

Unconscious incompetence: You don’t know that you don’t know how to succeed. Conscious incompetence: You know you don’t know how to succeed. Conscious competence: You’re succeeding, but you have to concentrate hard to perform your task correctly. Unconscious competence: You’ve completed the task so many times you can do it successfully without even thinking about it.

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

But, just as the games don’t always go the way we visualized, it’s never that easy.

If the side effects hit me, then they hit me. But I wasn’t going to fill my head with a bunch of scary possibilities that might never happen.

If you do everything you can to prepare your mind, you can stay neutral no matter what.

It takes each of us to make the difference for all of us.

In a team environment—whether it’s a sports team, a company, or a family—we all have weight to carry. Everyone matters. Collective consciousness is a real thing. It allows us to help one another drive forward to a common goal. The right team is a major competitive advantage.

In sports, general managers and team presidents become rock stars when they can assemble the best rosters.

James told the Journal that playing with Caruso “gives our team a sense of calmness.

What I learned is that we don’t think nearly enough about how we should be acting as the general manager or team president in our own lives.

What teammates are we choosing to help us navigate the challenges life throws at us? Do we have a lead-off hitter who gives us a spark? Do we have an offensive tackle who can protect us? Do we have a rebounding power forward who can help us bounce back when we miss?

I needed people who could help me deal with fear and pain and sudden changes. I didn’t need to involve people who couldn’t handle the information or who had their own major struggles to conquer.

Part of this decision came from working with teams. I had seen how much the addition of a key role player could help, and I also had seen how one high-maintenance player could siphon off the energy of everyone else in the locker room. I couldn’t afford to have any energy siphoned off. Another factor in this decision stemmed from—like so many other things in my life—my dad. I’ll

Our conversation turned to which people you can talk to or solicit advice from in those situations. Without revealing that I was dealing with that very issue in my own life, I offered some advice of my own. “You need to understand people in your life who are not good with that type of information,” I said. “You need to not put them in a position to disappoint you.

At least that’s what I thought at first. I had resolved to keep the circle extraordinarily tight because I didn’t want to put that burden on anyone else if I could avoid it. But one of the people I did want in the circle convinced me I needed to broaden it a bit. And I listened because he had already lived through what I was going through.

Another great piece of advice Mark gave me was to pray. Mark was relatively early in his education as a Christian when he got diagnosed, but he had been reading in the Bible and listening to sermons about people asking God to help them carry the weight in their lives. So he tried it. As Mark prayed, he said, “They said, ‘Cast your burdens on me. Cast your anxieties on me, so I’m doing that, and I need you right now.” That brought Mark peace. I took Mark’s advice.

In the best of times, a team can make life more fun. In the worst of times, a team can keep you afloat.

We all have to lead at some point in our lives, whether we’re someone’s boss at work or whether we’re a parent responsible for the upbringing of small humans. And the best way to lead is to lead like a coach.

This is how Maria put it, and it’s perfect. “Find what people do well, and then encourage them to do more. That’s the great thing about a coach, right? It’s knowing what the person does well, and then helping them visualize what you see in them that they can do better.” I was raised by a coach in more ways than

coach is someone who accepts the responsibility to develop, challenge, and support people (individually or collectively) who have asked for guidance.

Every coach I’ve worked with has their own style, but the best ones share a lot of the same characteristics. They’re adaptable.

They aren’t afraid to challenge widely held assumptions.

They aren’t focused as much on winning as they are drawing the best performance out of their players—which, in turn, leads to wins.