 I'm still working on all the same stuff you guys are working on, have the same challenges and struggles that you do. We're all going to be works in progress. We're all going to be under construction, and at no point do I expect them to put me under museum glass to be a finished product. So these are all things that we need to continue to work on. For more than 15 years, Alan Stein, Jr. worked with the highest performing basketball players on the planet, including iconic superstars such as Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, and Kobe Bryant. He is here today to share proven strategies on how you can utilize the same mindset, habits, and routines that elite athletes use to perform at a world-class level. Using proven principles from his book, Raise Your Game, Alan has worked with global brands such as American Express, Pepsi, and Starbucks, as well as championship caliber sports programs like Penn State Football and Yukon Men's Basketball. He is excited to provide you with a series of practical, actionable lessons you can implement immediately to improve organizational performance and achieve higher levels of personal influence, impact, and significance. Alan is a passionate father of three, and he never lets his kids be him in anything. Ever. Please help me welcome Alan Stein, Jr. What do you stand for? What do you believe in? What are the non-negotiable principles that you use to guide your life? Are you at a point where you live by a standard as opposed to living by emotion? When you can live by core values instead of living by the roller coaster of feelings that we experience as human beings, you'll become the most magnetic person in any room. But first and foremost, you have to get crystal on what those core values are. And from a core value standpoint, it actually makes decision making so much easier when you're clear on your core values. This doesn't mean you won't still have really hard decisions to make. It simply means you'll now have a framework to make those decisions easier. Because now you run every single decision in your life through the filter of, is this an alignment with my core values or not? And then the goal is to get as many of your decisions as humanly possible and as consistently as possible to be in alignment with your core values. But don't expect about a thousand. I'm certainly not. Just know as human beings we are flawed. We're going to have lapses in judgment. We're going to make poor decisions. So we're not looking for perfection, but instead let's be motivated by progress and see if you can consistently make better decisions today that are in alignment with your core values than you did yesterday. Make better decisions today in alignment with your core values than maybe you made last year. Be proud of the path you're on and be proud of the direction that you're going. Also keep in mind that when you live by core values, you become the type of leader that others want to follow and you become the teammate that others want to play with. And for those of you that do lead teams, you can't lead a team somewhere you're not going yourself and the team can't be something that you are not. So we have to get crystal clear on our core values. And the reason that we start with self-awareness is the very first step to improving the team is improving yourself. Do you realize if each and every one of you comes back better this year than you did last year, the team will get better by default. Nothing else is even possible. And that's the commitment that each and every one of us needs to make. Can we make slightly better decisions this year than we did last year? Can we have slightly better habits this year than we did last year? Can we have slightly better cohesion and teamwork this year than we did last year? If you guys are interested and committed to making systematic, incremental, sustainable progress, then you'll continue to be best in class. So let's take a look at the three areas of self-awareness that each and every one of us needs to work towards to heighten our own personal performance so we can make a maximum contribution to the team. The first will be our habits. Second is mindset. And third is focus. So let's take a look at habits. The things we do unconsciously and the things we do consistently. There was a Duke University study that found that 42% of everything we do during our waking hours is habitual. Think about that for a second. Almost half of everything we do from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed is on autopilot. Each and every one of us have grooved a series of predictable, repeatable behaviors that we now derive comfort from. So now I want to ask you a very important rhetorical question. I've already established that every single person in this room is a high performer. You all are the Kobe Bryant's of what you do. But are you a high performer because of your habits or are you a high performer in spite of your habits? If you were to write down the things that you do every single day of your life, what percentage of those things are taking you closer to the person you're trying to become? And what percentage of those things are hindering you and dragging you down? If you were to literally write down what you do every single day of your life, what percentage of those things are helping you and what percentage of those things are hindering you? And I say that with a smile because I don't want anyone worried about perfection. Life is not a perfect game. Business is not a perfect game. Instead, I want you motivated and inspired by progress. It goes back to what I said a couple of moments ago. Can you have slightly better habits this year than you did last year? Systematic, incremental, sustainable progress. Here's an actionable takeaway that I would love for you all to sit with this coming weekend. I'm going to explain how you do it right now. We don't have time to do it now. But sometime over the weekend, I want you to take out a piece of paper and I want you to draw a vertical line down the middle. On the left side of the paper, I want you to come up with an exhaustive list of the things that fill your bucket. Mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, if that's appropriate to you. I want you to come up with a list of the things that charge you up, that light you up, that make you smile, that you enjoy doing, that adds to your confidence, that adds to your optimism. Make a list of the things that fill your bucket. These can be things for your physical well-being, taking a yoga class, hopping on your peloton bike, taking your dog for a walk. These can be things for your mental well-being, reading a book, listening to a podcast, watching a documentary. These can be things for your mental or your spiritual well-being, meditation or prayer or conversation and coffee with a loved one. But come up with a list of the things that fill your bucket. And you'll know it fills your bucket because as you're writing the list, you'll unconsciously start to smile. Then on the right side of the line, on the right side of the paper, I want you to write down how you've been spending the bookends of your day, your morning and your evening routine. How have you been spending the first 60 minutes after you wake up and the last 60 minutes before you go to bed? Now, I don't want you to write down what you know you should be doing. I don't want you to write down what other people on Facebook are doing. I don't want you to write down what you think I'd want to hear that you're doing. I want you to be honest with yourself. And if you're willing to have the courage to lean in with some honesty and some vulnerability and write down what you've actually been doing, and then you compare that to the set of things that you know you should be doing, there's a good chance you're going to uncover a term Chris brought up early today when he made his opening remarks, which is called a performance gap. Doing this exercise almost guarantees if you do it with some honesty and some vulnerability, you're going to start to uncover a performance gap, which is the gap between what we know we should do to be our best selves and what we actually do on a regular basis. And the key to improving your individual performance and your ability to make a contribution to this team is to slowly start narrowing that gap, slowly start taking things from the left side of the paper and working them in and integrating them in and executing them into the right side of the paper. Start adding those things to your morning and your evening routine. Doing so, you will immediately increase your performance, your productivity, your efficiency, your effectiveness, and your sense of fulfillment. See, when you sign up to be a part of something bigger than yourself, when you decide to be a part of a team, you're signing an unwritten agreement that you will do everything in your power to show up as your best self as consistently as possible. And folks, you can't do that if it's haphazard. You can only do that with intentionality, which means we have to take control of our habits and we have to take control of our morning and evening routine. And like I said, do not worry about perfection. Don't worry about where you are right now at the moment. Focus more on the direction at where you're going. Don't worry about where you are right now in this moment. Just make sure your arrow is pointed forward or slightly pointed up. And those will be our habits. And I'm telling you, it's almost like a magic trick. If you start taking some of the things from the left side of the paper and you care enough about yourself to put them on the right side, you will see your productivity, you'll see your efficiency, your effectiveness, your performance, and your fulfillment start to skyrocket immediately. And for the most part, when I look at attitude, I think the most important aspect of that is having a level of acceptance and surrender to the fact that we do not control the events and circumstances and what people say and what people do. We don't have control over any of that. But each and every one of us controls our response to those things. So let's spend less time worrying about events and circumstances and what other people say and do and put all of our attention into having thoughtful, intentional, forward moving responses. We don't control the events, we control our responses. That's the half of the equation that we need to make sure we focused on. And that's what it comes down to attitude. The best attitudes in the world are the people that acknowledge, I don't control this, I do control this, and that's what I'm going to focus on. And now the third step, let's talk about refocusing the lens on the process. It's great to have goals. It's great to have outcomes. I think every single person in this room should have a North Star because that's going to help give you some clarity on the direction that you need to go. But I'm a big believer that once you've decided on your goal or your North Star, you can take your eyes off of it and you can put it on the process, the daily behaviors, the micro skills, the decisions that you make on a daily basis to inch you closer to that. The best example I can think of which I think is very appropriate for this group is if you're tasked with building a brick wall, don't worry so much about the wall, pay a lot more attention to the bricks. I'm not very handy, I'm not very good at building stuff, but even I have the discipline to take one brick and set it exactly where it needs to go and then take another brick and set it exactly where it needs to go. And if I lay each brick with care and precision and I do that consistently, the wall will eventually take care of itself. That's an adage in sports that Bill Walsh, the Hall of Fame coach for the 49ers used to say. The scoreboard will take care of itself if you focus on the process. I learned this firsthand, these traits of next play, controlling the controllables in the process. In 2017 I was invited to be a part of a extreme fitness event at the home of Jesse Itzler and Sarah Blakely. If you don't know who they are, Jesse is a serial entrepreneur, a very successful entrepreneur, an unbelievable speaker and author and an endurance superhuman. His wife Sarah Blakely is the founder of Spanx, a women's undergarment company and she once laid claim to being the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. So a very high performing couple and they invited 100 of us to their home in New Fairfield, Connecticut. And the backyard of their home was a patch of grass that was 80 yards long, so almost the length of a football field and was at a 40 degree slope. I don't know if any of you have ever done some incline work on a conventional gym treadmill, but a gym treadmill only goes up to 15 percent. And if you ever put it up to 15 percent to go for a walk on a treadmill, you feel like you're going to fall off the back of the earth. And this was at 40 percent, 80 yards long, 40 percent grade. And our task for that day was to run up and down that hill 100 times. That event was appropriately called Hell on the Hill and that it was. Around rep 70, I hit a massive wall. I was fried. I was done mentally and physically. I could feel blisters forming under my big toes. My knees and my back were throbbing. And I apologize for the visual because I know you guys just ate, but I had a chafing situation that was absolutely out of this world. And I was ready to quit. I was done. I'm very grateful that I had a friend who was running. His name is Steve Wojahowski, Duke basketball legend and former head coach at Marquette. And I knew that Steve and I were running at about the same pace. So to commiserate in misery, I asked him how many reps he had left. And he smiled, which really irritated me. And he said, I've got one rep, one rep. There is no way you, and then he finished his sentence. I have one rep 30 more times. That is the epitome of being in the present moment. So you don't worry about the end result. You don't worry about the 100. You just have to worry about getting up and down that hill one more time. You just focus on the next play. You take your mind off of your blisters and your knees and your back and your chafing situation and you put it on your own effort and your own attitude. And you don't worry about the North Star or the end goal or the completion of 100. You focus on the process because you can't get to number 100 if you don't do rep 71. So you stay focused on that process. And his friendly reminder is what allowed me to finish that. It took me four hours to go up and down the hill 100 times. And I was only able to do it by staying.