HEAT'S NBA VICTORY: FROM LOSERS TO
WINNERS
The Mental Side of a Championship Season
If America is the land of second
chances, LeBron James and the Miami Heat certainly offer a prime example. It
was only one season ago that King James talked about taking his talents to
South Beach, and well before the first tip-off of the season, the celebrations
were already underway. True, the Heat made it to the 2011 NBA Finals, but by
the time the team was struggling in game after game of sub-par fourth-quarter
play, more people were cheering against LeBron and the Heat than for them.
Just one year later the confetti
poured from the top of the American Airlines Arena and the champagne flowed as
the Heat won the 2012 Championship and “the King” was crowned as Finals MVP. With
less braggadocio and more maturity, the Heat had become a truly formidable foe,
and underlying the stellar offense and unrelenting defense, a number of changes
had taken place in the soul of the team and its star player – changes that
helped propel them to victory.
So what happened? There are a
number of things the Heat did to transform themselves from “losers” to
“winners” – things that any team, player, or coach might want to consider when
it comes to finding your own path to championship performance.
Pain and failure can lead to turning things around
In 2011, the Heat had clearly set
themselves up for a big fall. With all the celebrations that took place before
a single game had been played, these guys had put the cart before the horse.
Reflecting on this a year later, Dwyane Wade said, “This team, we had so much pain, so much hurt, so much embarrassment
from last season that … nothing needed to be said. From the first day (of this
season) we (were) on a mission, and that mission was not complete until
tonight.”
When things don’t work out like we had hoped, we are tempted to blame
anyone and anything. Not surprising, that’s exactly what LeBron did – at first.
“When we lost, I blamed a lot of people besides myself,” LeBron admitted. “I
wasn’t ready to own it.”
It took growing from that pain for James to position himself for the chance
at redemption, and to capitalize on it. True champions look inside, don’t get
caught up in all the “what if’s” and “if only’s,” but find the grit to go
forward. “I realized there were no
short-cuts,” LeBron said shortly after being named the Finals MVP.
What’s the real goal?
After publicly announcing at the
start of the 2010-11 season just how many titles there were going to win (not
four … not five … not six …), it was clear that the Heat were playing to prove
something. Winning the title had become an all-consuming objective, and “doing
the work” kind of got lost. LeBron
recalled, “The best thing that happened to me last year was us losing the
Finals… and me playing the way I played.
It humbled me. After the 2011 Championships I took a couple of weeks off
and then I got back to the gym and got back to the basics. I had hit rock
bottom. I really wanted it, but I wasn’t doing it the right way. I knew what it
was going to take, and I was going to have to change as a basketball player,
and I was going to have to change as a person,” LeBron said after Thursday
night’s Championship win.
What player doesn’t seek success,
fortune and fame? What LeBron came to understand is that these qualities are
rarely achieved by aiming your sights at them directly – they are mostly found
when we focus on “doing the work” and let the results – the championships and
the accolades – take care of themselves. In the course of my own work, helping
scores of athletes arrive at this understanding has brought them the results
they had hoped for … whether it was upping their points or rebounds per game,
or helping teams to play better at “money time.” Key to the process was to stop
agonizing over the results and make the pursuit of excellence in the quality of
their play their chief focus.
Let go of the baggage
The way that LeBron left Cleveland
did not sit well with a lot of people. “Last year a lot of people were saying I
was a selfish person and a selfish player, and I really let it affect me. All last year I was playing to prove everybody
wrong. I was angry and playing with a
chip on my shoulder. At the end of the day I was basically fighting against
myself.”
Like so many players, one post
player I worked with always did a great job in practice, but had difficulty
bringing his “A” game in competition. I told him that trying to prove something
out there was like playing with a 50-pound weight around his neck. “Just focus
on accepting the challenge of the moment as a way of testing your talents and
all your preparation. However you play isn’t going to really prove anything –
and certainly not to the people who care about you.” Being free of the extra
baggage helped him go out and play a more aggressive and confident game.
Dr.
Thomas Perls, author of the book Living
To Be 100, reported research findings that individuals who are effective in
“letting go” thrive much better than those who insist on holding on to past
hurts or the need to prove something or to “even the score” with others. In
sport this is certainly true!
Ego is fine… when held in check
LeBron talked about how losing
humbled him and made him re-assess his focus. When he talked about getting back
to basics – the rebounding and the defense – he was focusing on the qualities
that make him a champion. Sure – our ego is on the line (Are we going to start?
How many minutes are we going to play?) But if we are able to put that aside
and focus on “doing the job” – on the proper effort and constant improvement – we
are more likely to keep growing as a player and stay on the path to reaching
our goals. .
Dwyane Wade, who himself had been
the MVP of the 2006 Finals, put ego aside and accepted a different role in
helping the Heat to hit their collective stride. “We made the decision two
years ago to become a team, LeBron, Chris, myself, and the other guys decided to
come together. So you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to make sure that you
reach your goal. And I had a position (and) a role to play. It might have
changed a little bit, but at the end of the day we all had one common goal, and
that was to become champions.”
Even champions make mistakes –
they just bounce back faster
My conversations with many elite
athletes lead me to conclude that at the highest levels of play, championships
are won by players and teams who make the fewest mistakes. But the fact is that
even the best athletes make mistakes. The champions are the ones who are
resilient – who know how to move on quickly, so that mistakes don’t take them
out of their game plan and lead to even more mistakes. Just as Mike Miller’s
astounding seven 3-pointers fueled the Heat in Game 5, the mistakes that the
Thunder made seemed to take the wind out of their sails. But, as players and
coaches on both teams noted throughout the series, you have to keep “grinding
it out,” no matter what.
Bonnie
St. John, silver medal winner in downhill skiing in the 1984 Paralympic Games,
learned an important lesson at the time.
“In my first run of the slalom, I was ahead, but then I fell down and
had to get up to complete the race. In fact, the woman who won the gold medal
also fell down. I knew from previous races that I could ski faster than her.
But what won the gold medal for her was that she got up faster than I did after
falling down. I learned that everybody falls down, but Olympic athletes get up
faster, and gold medalists get up the fastest of all.”
Hang in there
Coach Eric Spoelstra, whose own job
this season was at times thought to be on the line, was asked what the biggest
challenge was as the man charged with bringing the team back from last season’s
loss. “Just to pick up our spirits and stay on course. We knew we could do it,
but it would be a long season and a tough road. We got knocked down two or
three times this playoff run, but the thing that matters, we got up and we kept
on working.”
In 2000, tennis great Gustavo
Kuerten took an early two-set lead in the finals of the French Open, when he got
trounced 2-6 in the 3rd set and was in danger of losing the fourth
set as well. After winning that set, the match, and the title in a tie-break,
he said that when he felt his game slipping away he told himself that if he
could just hang on, his game and his confidence would return – and all he
needed to do was just keep believing in himself. More recently, New York Knicks
guard Jeremy Lin told reporters that as long as he had one person who believed
in him, he could keep going during those tough times before he got picked up by
the Knicks and life became rosy.
You have to please yourself
In the press conference, LeBron was
asked what he learned about himself as a ballplayer and as a man on the journey
to the championship.
“The biggest thing I learned,” he
replied, “is that you can’t control what people say about you, what people
think about you. You have to be true to yourself, to the people that surround
you, and to your loved ones. I put a lot of hard work into this … It just shows
when you’re committed and you give everything to the game, the game pays off
and it gives back to you.”
In the end, redemption came from “doing
it the right way.” And while the spectacular play of LeBron and D-Wade, and the
way that the rest of the team rose to the occasion, brought them the championship
trophy, perhaps in the qualities that make for true champions, the Heat players
and Coach Spoelstra really aren’t all that different from the coach and players
of Oklahoma City.
My own work in helping athletes and
teams to “do it the right way” has often given them the tools to achieve top
performances. But mostly, when we have talked about it afterwards, I remember
their profound feelings of pride in having hung in, worked hard, and regrouped
as necessary to reach the goals they had set for themselves years earlier, and
attaining in the process a deep sense of personal excellence.
© 2012 by Dr. Mitch
Smith
