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 hadnât 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 wasnât 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 wasnât trying to help a team go from decent to great. I was helping myself surviveâto 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 âWhy do you bash positive thinking?â Iâm not bashing positive thinking by promoting neutral thinking. Sometimes positive thinking is just . . . impossible. And positive thinking with no basis for that positivity isnât 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 isnât 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 donât have feelings, nor do they care how you feel.) In March 2021, as people were being vaccinated and the idea of a ânormalâ 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. âThe early coronavirus mistakes were mostly mistakes of excessive optimism,â Leonhardt tweeted to his 147,000 followers.1 âBut thatâs 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.â
The pandemic offers a hard lesson in why we have to remain neutral. Iâm going to drill into your head that negative thinking needs to be avoided at all costs. If thatâs the only thing you take away from this book, youâre profiting. But that isnât difficult to explain. Even without empirical dataâof which there is plentyâyou already know that thinking negatively can harm you. Itâs a little more difficult to explain why unearned positive thinking can be harmful at times. Norman Vincent Pealeâs 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 theoryânot supported by any research at the timeâthat 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? Itâs 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 doesnât guarantee what will happen next. My friend Lawrence Frank is the president of basketball operations for the NBAâs Los Angeles Clippers, and he explains this concept really well. âJust because you missed ten shots in a row doesnât mean the eleventh is going to be a miss,â he says. âAnd just because youâre ten-for-ten doesnât mean the next shot is going to be a make.â
If we accept that the future isnât 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 didnât set our feet before rising to shoot. Recognizing and correcting those issues can help the next shotâand the one after that oneâgo through the net. Neutral thinking forces us to seek the truth. But it doesnât require us to render an opinion. If we missed ten shots in a row, it doesnât mean we stink at shooting a basketball. If we made ten shots in a row, it doesnât 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 âI suckâ or âIâm on fire.â 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 youâve 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. Iâll teach you how to process informationâgood, bad, and otherwiseâto help guide your behaviors. By opening this book, youâve accepted a challenge. This isnât 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 theyâll need yet another surgery and another round of radiation. Theyâll despair when the virus doesnât 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 thinkingâor 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 dadâs personal lab rat. Every night I was warned of the dangers of âStinkinâ Thinkinââ 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 âto believeâ and be positive. As a high school teacher in Los Angeles and in Florida, I used my dadâs âUnlocking Your Potentialâ curriculum. I embedded positive psychology into my social sciences curriculum. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter how creative I got, I couldnât get more than about half the students to buy into those ideas. As a high school, club boysâ, and girlsâ soccer coach, I noticed some players gravitated to positivity. But if it wasnât 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 worldâs 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 âbe positiveâ kept falling. I realized I couldnât 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 doesnât support that. Your own personal experience doesnât support that. I joined tennis star Victoria Azarenka on her podcast in 2021,2 and she sounded like many of the athletes Iâve 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 âcringeyâ to her. Her mind craved a different approach.
Most elite athletes never want to hear âJust be positive.â Whether theyâre 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 tomorrowâs 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 worldâs default mentalityânegative thinking. Itâs easier. Itâs safer. And we are hardwired to assume the worst because we arenât 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. âWe have found bad to be stronger than good in a disappointingly relentless pattern,â the studyâs authors concluded.
Thatâs frustrating, but simply being positive wasnât a viable alternative. Clients tuned out that messaging as well. I understood my own educational platform remained largely undeveloped against every athleteâs toughest competitor: negativity. It seeds self-doubt, fear, anxiety, cautiousness, and hopelessness. If Iâd said âJust be positive,â 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 Unionâs 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 traitsâphysical components such as speed and strength but also abstract concepts such as toughness or patienceâcould 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 âlearning to be nonnegative,â but I didnât teach any counter idea. The fact that being negative clearly and provably made you perform worse didnât 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 youâd better be able to build a convincing case as to how your request would help him on the court. He was a prodigyâonce identified as the next great American superstarâwho in 2007 had to spend twenty-three hours a day in a body cast following back surgery. Then, when that surgery didnât work, he had another one. And then he came back to return to the top thirty in the world rankings. Taylor is a badass. Taylorâs 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 werenât 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, Iâve leaned on a ton of world-class athletes or performers in order to stress-test different ideas. âNonnegativityâ made sense to him. It wasnât bullshit. He knew the less negative he could be on a court, the better heâd 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 armyâs 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 Alabamaâs Nick Saban or Florida Stateâs 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 âl...