Getting to Neutral

How to Survive and Thrive in a Chaotic World

Trevor Moawad, Andy Staples

• Editore: HarperOne
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780063111929
• Argomento: Commerce
• Categoria: Prise de décision

Foreword by Ciara

In this breakthrough book, the author of Wall Street Journal bestseller It Takes What It Takes provides life-changing, step-by-step guidance on how to successfully navigate adversity and defeat negativity by downshifting to neutral thinking.

It's easy to be positive when everything is coming up roses. But what happens when life goes sideways? Many of us lapse into a self-defeating negative spiral that makes it hard to accomplish anything. Getting to Neutral is a step-by-step guide that shows readers how to use mental conditioning coach Trevor Moawad's innovative motivational system to defeat negativity and thrive.

Neutral thinking is a judgment-free, process-oriented approach that helps us coolly assess situations in high-pressure moments. Moawad walks readers through how to downshift to neutral no matter how dire the situation. He shows us how to behave our way to success, how to determine and practice our values in a neutral framework, and how to surround ourselves with a team that helps us to stay neutral.

Filled with raw, inspiring stories of how Trevor navigated health challenges with neutral thinking as well as insights drawn from some of the world's best athletes, coaches, and leaders, Getting to Neutral will help readers learn to handle even the most complex and turbulent situations with calm, clarity, and resolve.

Chapter 1

Why Neutral?

We locked in the words for It Takes What It Takes during the summer of 2019. Writing it had been a form of therapy for me. During much of the process, I was traveling across the country to work with various teams and businesses. Back at home in Phoenix, I was in the midst of a divorce. Drilling down on the principles of what I teach helped me live those principles during a period of extreme stress. Or at least it felt like extreme stress at the time. Late in 2019, after I had submitted the manuscript but before the book hit stores, I woke up with yellow eyes, a harbinger of some brutal months to come as I moved into 2020. The year 2020 would teach me I hadn’t really known stress before.

As I recovered from major surgery and prepared for radiation treatment, a pandemic shut down the world. A new disease had crossed oceans. It was highly contagious. It was lethal in ways scientists initially struggled to understand. As doctors worked to learn as much as they could in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19, fear gripped those of us without medical degrees. We worried we might lose loved ones. We feared for our own health. And it wasn’t only fear of the virus. We feared what might happen to our jobs as businesses were forced to pause and, in some cases, close. We feared what might happen to children as schools were forced to close. Some struggled with isolation. Many struggled financially. The negativity that I implored readers in the first book to avoid was inescapable. It enveloped the entire planet.

As we all struggled to get our footing in this new reality, I realized that dealing with the C-word (not COVID-19) and COVID-19 would require an even greater commitment to neutral thinking. Unlike when I taught the concepts to coaches and athletes, I wasn’t trying to help a team go from decent to great. I was helping myself survive—to make it to the next day mentally intact. Meanwhile, I watched everyone else trying to manage through the pandemic and realized just how critical these skills are for all of us. Sure, they can help Russell Wilson try to reach the Super Bowl. But they also can help snap us out of a Groundhog Day loop. They can bring us back from the edge of a ruinous negative spiral.

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. And positive thinking with no basis for that positivity isn’t helpful and, in some cases, can be hurtful. We can all agree that negative thinking only affects us negatively, but being less negative and being more positive are not synonymous. Positive thinking isn’t the most effective antidote to negativity. Neutral thinking is.

New York Times writer David Leonhardt made this point implicitly in 2021 when discussing the pandemic. Some of the events of the first months of the pandemic hit people hardest who had initially believed that simply thinking positively would help the world deal with the disease in a more expedient fashion. (Note to everyone: viruses don’t have feelings, nor do they care how you feel.) In March 2021, as people were being vaccinated and the idea of a “normal” existence began to feel real for the first time in a year, Leonhardt noted an uptick in skepticism toward the vaccine combined with a general feeling of hopelessness that sprang from a year of living with the virus. “The early coronavirus mistakes were mostly mistakes of excessive optimism,” Leonhardt tweeted to his 147,000 followers.¹ “But that’s not the only possible kind of public-health mistake. And at our current stage in the pandemic, undue pessimism has become as much of a problem as undue optimism.”

The pandemic offers a hard lesson in why we have to remain neutral. I’m going to drill into your head that negative thinking needs to be avoided at all costs. If that’s the only thing you take away from this book, you’re profiting. But that isn’t difficult to explain. Even without empirical data—of which there is plenty—you already know that thinking negatively can harm you. It’s a little more difficult to explain why unearned positive thinking can be harmful at times. Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking has sold millions of copies and spawned a cottage industry of books, audio programs, business seminars, and tchotchkes that your most earnest friend probably kept on their desk at work (back when people had desks at an office). Positive thinking, in most cases, is a better alternative than negative thinking. But think back to the early days of the pandemic. Remember the magical thinking from politicians and pundits that the disease would simply disappear? Remember the theory—not supported by any research at the time—that the heat of summer would burn off the virus? 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.

Those people would have been much better off thinking neutrally. What, exactly, is neutral thinking? 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. My friend Lawrence Frank is the president of basketball operations for the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, and he explains this concept really well. “Just because you missed ten shots in a row doesn’t mean the eleventh is going to be a miss,” he says. “And just because you’re ten-for-ten doesn’t mean the next shot is going to be a make.”

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. We can accept that maybe we missed those ten shots in a row because we let our elbow flare out or because we didn’t set our feet before rising to shoot. Recognizing and correcting those issues can help the next shot—and the one after that one—go through the net. 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. 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.” Those are judgments, and they have no place in neutral thinking. Other motivational systems encourage illusion or self-delusion. I never will.

I will show you how to accept what you’ve done in the past and understand that you control what happens in the future. Neutral thinking asks you to focus on the next set of steps in order to move forward. I’ll teach you how to process information—good, bad, and otherwise—to help guide your behaviors. By opening this book, you’ve accepted a challenge. This isn’t for everyone. There are a lot more people who want to believe everything will be okay instead of constantly analyzing their own personal data to ensure they are behaving in ways that will give them the tools to handle anything life throws their way. But the people who believe in magical positive thinking will crumble when the doctor tells them they’ll need yet another surgery and another round of radiation. They’ll despair when the virus doesn’t burn up in the heat of the summer. Meanwhile, the people who already think negatively will fall further down the hole in those moments. Those who stay neutral can persevere and even thrive.

It took me a while to come to neutral thinking—or at least to put a name to the practice I observed while working with championship athletes in football, soccer, baseball, basketball, and tennis. My father, Bob Moawad, was a nationally renowned motivational speaker. He produced programs that were taught in schools throughout the country and he leaned heavily into positive thinking. For a time, he was the president of the National Association for Self-Esteem. As a kid, I was my dad’s personal lab rat. Every night I was warned of the dangers of “Stinkin’ Thinkin’” and was required to repeat mantras and affirmations that essentially were attempts to speak achievements into existence.

So much of what my father taught relative to choosing a positive or negative approach never hit home with me, but as a young man, I tried to follow his teaching. As a team captain in high school soccer and basketball, I tried ceaselessly to convince my peers to be more positive and failed. As a soccer and basketball player at Occidental College, I was made fun of relentlessly for trying to get my peers “to believe” and be positive. As a high school teacher in Los Angeles and in Florida, I used my dad’s “Unlocking Your Potential” curriculum. I embedded positive psychology into my social sciences curriculum. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter how creative I got, I couldn’t get more than about half the students to buy into those ideas. As a high school, club boys’, and girls’ soccer coach, I noticed some players gravitated to positivity. But if it wasn’t in their wiring, they struggled to change and defaulted to negativity. As my career progressed, I watched national team members and global superstars struggle similarly. I understood why. I had felt exactly the way they did.

As I evolved from high school teacher/coach to sports psychology consultant to mental conditioning coach to director of performance at a school for the world’s best athletes (IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida) to college and pro sports consultant, the level of competitor kept rising and the percentage of the population willing to just “be positive” kept falling. I realized I couldn’t sell the pivotal tenet that the personal development industry has pushed on all of us for years. And what is that? That your life, your world, your present, and your future will all get better if you embrace the power of positive thinking.

That simply is not true. The evidence doesn’t support that. Your own personal experience doesn’t support that. I joined tennis star Victoria Azarenka on her podcast in 2021,² and she sounded like many of the athletes I’ve worked with over the years. Vika, who has won the Australian Open twice and spent fifty-one weeks ranked No. 1 in the world, said the constant push to be positive always felt “cringey” to her. Her mind craved a different approach.

Most elite athletes never want to hear “Just be positive.” Whether they’re training their bodies or their brains, they want to know how, and they want specifics. Which lifts in the weight room? How many reps of each? How many hours of sleep per night? What temperature should the ice bath be to reduce soreness tomorrow? How should I visualize tomorrow’s game? Should I play it all out in my mind or just potential key moments?

Some of my clients tried to embrace positive thinking but got frustrated and wound up stuck in the world’s default mentality—negative thinking. It’s easier. It’s safer. And we are hardwired to assume the worst because we aren’t that far along in our evolution from a time (only a few thousand years ago) when a negative consequence likely meant death. A 2001 study by researchers from Case Western Reserve University and the Free University of Amsterdam³ examined multiple studies across decades on such diverse topics as moods, sexual relations, and the words teachers use when working with children. 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.

That’s frustrating, but simply being positive wasn’t a viable alternative. Clients tuned out that messaging as well. I understood my own educational platform remained largely undeveloped against every athlete’s toughest competitor: negativity. It seeds self-doubt, fear, anxiety, cautiousness, and hopelessness. If I’d said “Just be positive,” those athletes would have run for the doors like wannabe pre-med students run from organic chemistry.

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. Basically, scientists studied what traits and habits made the best athletes and then prescribed those habits to developing athletes. If those traits—physical components such as speed and strength but also abstract concepts such as toughness or patience—could be nurtured in young athletes, then they would train even more efficiently and would have a massive advantage in competition. It turns out the Soviets also used tons of steroids. No one should copy that, but the mental piece of their training was worth examining and adapting. 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 I still needed a building block, a default mindset that would make my clients ready to accept the more advanced training that would come later.

I knew generally the direction I wanted to go, but I needed to codify it in a way I could explain and teach. That way, I could offer a specific set of guidelines that were much more palatable for that population to digest and apply. Around 2013, about when Vika was winning her second Aussie Open, I set the goal to find a way to teach a method of thinking that seemed to be the default mode of the best of the best in any field. I started out calling it “learning to be nonnegative,” but I didn’t teach any counter idea. The fact that being negative clearly and provably made you perform worse didn’t mean that being positive worked the opposite way. From 2013 forward, I focused on helping clients understand the value of eliminating negativity.

Taylor Dent, or TD as his friends call him, is one of my all-time favorite athletes and people. He was a world-class tennis player who demanded a lawyerlike performance from his coaches. If you wanted him to do anything other than play tennis in order to help him get better at it, then you’d better be able to build a convincing case as to how your request would help him on the court. He was a prodigy—once identified as the next great American superstar—who in 2007 had to spend twenty-three hours a day in a body cast following back surgery. Then, when that surgery didn’t work, he had another one. And then he came back to return to the top thirty in the world rankings. Taylor is a badass. Taylor’s agent Oliver van Lindonk and I were friends, and Oliver brought me in behind the scenes to help sell TD on the new emerging forms of training that helped with injury prevention and overall fitness. These weren’t really sport specific. If it connected to tennis, Taylor was on board. But if it was crazy leg kicks or bizarre stretches or running hills, Taylor would debate you on the merits of the training and send you running out of a room with your tail between your legs. He wanted to be convinced, and I loved it. Over time, Taylor and I became good friends. Over the years, I’ve leaned on a ton of world-class athletes or performers in order to stress-test different ideas. “Nonnegativity” made sense to him. It wasn’t bullshit. He knew the less negative he could be on a court, the better he’d perform. If TD was convinced a concept worked, anyone could be convinced. That helped me realize I was moving in the right direction.

I added the idea of nonnegativity to our education manuals for Russell Wilson, the Memphis Grizzlies, Michigan football, Florida State football, and Alabama football. I added it into the sessions I taught at the army’s Fort Bragg, at the Mayo Clinic and at EXOS, a training center frequented by pro athletes. I sat down and talked it through with coaches like Alabama’s Nick Saban or Florida State’s Jimbo Fisher or peers like Chad Bohling, who now serves as the mental conditioning coach for the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys. I sought out articles and video clips to drive the point home and, among my clientele, the case for “l...