The Distillation of Phil Jackson

The Distillation of Phil Jackson

Phil Jackson is a champion, nonconformist, lifelong learner, maverick, cultivator of talent, leader, and explorer of the unknown. In this Distillation, I’ll go into the mindsets, leadership lessons, and against-the-grain strategies Phil Jackson has used to become one of the greatest coaches in all of the sports. I ask you to remain open-minded to exploring the different ideas and practices Phil uses because it’s only by exploring new ways of thinking can we expand our own.

When people think about the prototypical championship coach Phil Jackson is not the person who comes to mind. We usually think of a hard-nosed, intense, and dominating type personality but Phil is far from that. Phil has been known as the “Zen Master” for the eastern influences and outside approaches he’s taken to coaching. He’s used all of these outside influences to master his craft. Phil has the record for most NBA Championships with a total of 13 championship rings. Phil won 2 as a player with the New York Knicks 6 with the Chicago Bulls and 5 with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Phil has carved his own path and my belief is that this is a hallmark of all people who become truly great. They are absolutely unapologetically authentic to themselves. Look at some of the best coaches in the world- Bill Belichick, John Wooden, Pete Carroll, Nick Saban, and Steve Kerr all have such vastly different coaching styles but they are all true to themselves.

Phil has done everything from having basketball epiphanies during an LSD trip, introducing Zen meditation to his players, to getting Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant to buy into his coaching system. In this Distillery I’ll go through the unique approaches Phil took on the path of winning more NBA Championships than anyone in history and hopefully open your eyes to the benefits of carving your own path and being true to yourself.
“What moves me is watching young men bond together and tap into the magic that arises when they focus—with their whole heart and soul—on something greater than themselves. Once you’ve experienced that, it’s something you never forget.”
This Distillation is broken down into the following sections

Phil Jackson Journey

Zen Mind
Principles of Leadership
Developing a Winning System
Mindfulness & Ancient Wisdom
Mind Games With Players & Coaches

Self-Discovery

11 Lessons You’ll Learn from Phil Jackson

Quiet the mind. A quiet mind builds awareness and allows you to be poised and in control, in any situation, you enter.
Embrace the unknown and carve your own path in life. “The path is for your steps alone.”
Never stop learning and exploring new ways of thinking.
Give up control and foster an environment that allows for individual expression. Rules reduce freedom and responsibility.
Create a sense of oneness with the group – “When a player surrenders his self-interest for the greater good, his fullest gifts as an athlete are manifested.”
The key to success is compassion and love.
Be in the present moment – In basketball, as in life, true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment
Break free of mental conditioning and discover your true nature.
The system you design gives you the output it’s designed for. Design a beautiful system
Transparency is key. Define people’s roles clearly.
If you have the right mindset, you can make any crisis or loss work for you.

“For me, basketball is an expression of life, a single, sometimes glittering thread, that reflects the whole. Like life, basketball is messy and unpredictable. It has its way with you, no matter how hard you try to control it. The trick is to experience each moment with a clear mind and open heart. When you do that, the game- and life-will take care of itself.”

“Things didn’t work out like I planned, but they worked out like I hoped.”

“The mistake that championship teams often make is to try to repeat their winning formula. But that rarely works because, by the time the next season starts, your opponents have studied all the videos and figured out how to counter every move you made. The key to sustained success is to keep growing as a team. Winning is about moving into the unknown and creating something new. Remember that scene in the first Indiana Jones movie when someone asks Indy what he’s going to do next, and he replies, ‘I don’t know, I’m making it up as we go along.’ That’s how I view leadership. It’s an act of controlled improvisation, a Thelonious Monk finger exercise, from one moment to the next.”

Becoming Phil Jackson

Phil Jackson is a fiercely independent individualistic who also loved and craved being part of a group. This unique combination sent him on a lifelong path of finding and losing himself again and again. We often think of people who achieve excellence to follow a straight line but Jackson, like most, that is far from the case with their journey.
Jackson embraced a host of alternative thinkers, including the writings of Carlos Castaneda, Lao Tzu, Lakota Sioux, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and many others. His pursuit left his teammates with the notion that he loved the knowledge more than he loved the game. But this wide breadth of knowledge provided the foundation for his approach to coaching. Jackson was consumed with new ideas, and they in turn fed his awareness of his own unfolding intuitive nature. Jackson was discovering his intuition as a child discovers walking.
He had learned that one sure way to explore this intuition and his mystical nature was smoking marijuana. He loved its effect on his mind, how it would allow him to see events and relationships in new and different ways. Weed pushed his intuition to places he had never imagined. He was obsessed with exploring his mind…

Phil Jackson Peak Experience

He ate LSD for breakfast in mid-May 1973, just days after the New York Knickerbockers had defeated the Los Angeles Lakers, four games to one, for the National Basketball Association championship.
“Jackson said this trip was one of the peak experiences of his life. In fact, that one single day of tripping joyously on the beach would go far in determining the person he would become. Spiritual Being. Father. Teacher. Coach. Warrior. Illusionist. Minister. Manipulator. Master of Mind Games. Riddler. Recuser. Filmmaker. Artist. Counselor. Psychologist. Salesman. Shaman. Leader. Champion.”
Out of this LSD trip came an enhanced love for the game of basketball and a new appreciation of team play, “I had to rediscover my ego in order to lose it … I was able to become a totally team-oriented player for the first time.”
His next year on the court was the most productive of his professional career. Biographer Rolan Lazenby wrote, “He experienced a new understanding of his teammates. When he looked at them, he felt that he saw all the forces and pressures pulling at them and affecting them. It was as if his team intuition had flowered into a sixth sense about the connectedness of basketball, a sixth sense that he would trust again and again over the years.”

He would prove himself as a psychologist, a master at group dynamics, an enhancer of athletic performance. One of the many things that separated him from other coaches is that he preferred to heap pressure on opponents as opposed to his own players.

Phil Jackson Journey of Self-Discovery

Phil’s journey of self-discovery was filled with uncertainty but also alive with promise.
When Phil was a child he had curious health issues that baffled doctors but left him feeling something wasn’t quite right with him.
“One night when I was about eleven or twelve, I was sick and battling a high fever. I was sleeping fitfully when all of a sudden I heard a roar, like the sound of a railroad train, building, and building until it grew so loud I thought the train was going to burst into my bedroom. The sensation was completely overpowering, but for some reason, I wasn’t frightened. As the noise kept getting louder, I felt a powerful surge of energy radiating through my body that was much stronger and more all-consuming than anything I’d ever experienced before. I don’t know where this power came from, but I awoke the next day feeling strong and confident and brimming with energy. The fever was gone, and after that my health improved dramatically and I rarely got colds or flus. However, the primary impact of this spontaneous experience was psychological, not physical. After that night I had a greater belief in myself and quiet faith that everything was going to work out for the best. I also seemed to be able to tap into a new source of energy within myself that I hadn’t sensed before. From that point on, I felt confident enough to throw my whole mind, body, and soul into what I loved—and that, as much as anything, has been the secret of my success in sports.”
“I’ve always wondered where that power came from and whether I could learn how to tap into it on my own, not just on the basketball court but in the rest of my life as well. That’s one of the things I was searching for as I set out on my journey of self-discovery. I didn’t know where I was going or what pitfalls I might stumble upon along the way. But I was encouraged by these lines from the Grateful Dead song “Ripple.” There is a road, no simple highway, Between the dawn and dark of night, And if you go no one may follow, That path is for your steps alone.”
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” ― Joseph Campbell

What I liked about basketball was how interconnected everything was. The game was a complex dance of moves and countermoves that made it much more alive than other sports I played. In addition, basketball demanded a high level of synergy. To succeed, you needed to rely upon everybody else on the floor, not just yourself. That gave the sport a certain transcendent beauty that I found deeply satisfying.

“One of my early discoveries was Joel S. Goldsmith, an innovative author, mystic, and former Christian Science healer who had founded his own movement, known as the Infinite Way. What attracted me to his work was his wholesale rejection of organization, ritual, and dogma. In his view, spirituality was a personal journey, period, and he designed his talks so that they could be interpreted from a wide range of perspectives. I was especially intrigued by Goldsmith’s take on meditation, which he saw as a way to experience inner silence and plug into your intuitive wisdom. I’d always thought of meditation as a therapeutic technique for quieting the mind and feeling more balanced. But Goldsmith showed me that it could also be a substitute for prayer, a doorway to the divine.”

“When I was named head coach of the Chicago Bulls in 1989, my dream was not just to win championships, but to do it in a way that wove together two of my greatest passions: basketball and spiritual exploration”.

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

I’d been interested in learning more about Zen ever since I’d read Shunryu Suzuki’s classic, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Suzuki, a Japanese teacher who played a key role in bringing Zen Buddhism to the West, talked about learning to approach each moment with a curious mind that is free of judgment. “If your mind is empty,” he writes, “it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
What appealed to me about Zen practice was its inherent simplicity. It didn’t involve chanting mantras or visualizing complex images, as had other practices I’d tried. Zen is pragmatic, down-to-earth, and open to exploration. It doesn’t require you to subscribe to a certain set of principles or take anything on faith; in fact, Zen encourages practitioners to question everything. Zen teacher Steve Hagen writes, “Buddhism is about seeing. It’s about knowing rather than believing or hoping or wishing. It’s also about not being afraid to examine anything and everything, including your own personal agendas.”
Shunryu Suzuki’s instructions on how to meditate are simple: Sit with your spine straight, your shoulders relaxed, and your chin pulled in, “as if you were supporting the sky with your head.” Follow your breath with your mind as it moves in and out like a swinging door. Don’t try to stop your thinking. If a thought arises, let it come, then let it go and return to watching your breath. The idea is not to try to control your mind but to let thoughts rise and fall naturally over and over again. After some practice, the thoughts will start to float by like passing clouds, and their power to dominate consciousness will diminish.
It took me years of practice to still my busy mind, but in the process, I discovered that the more aware I became of what was going on inside me, the more connected I became to the world outside. I became more patient with others and calmer under pressure—qualities that helped me immensely when I became a coach.

3 Aspects of Zen to Help a Leader

Three aspects of Zen have been critical to me as a leader:

1. GIVING UP CONTROL Suzuki writes, “If you want to obtain perfect calmness in your zazen, you should not be bothered by the various images you find in your mind. Let them come and let them go. Then they will be under control.” The best way to control people, he adds, is to give them a lot of room and encourage them to be mischievous, then watch them. “To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy,” he writes. “The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.”

2. TRUSTING THE MOMENT- the only thing that really matters—this very moment. Practicing Zen not only helped me become more acutely aware of what was happening in the present moment but also slowed down my experience of time because it diminished my tendency to rush into the future or get lost in the past. Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh talks about “dwelling happily in the present moment,” because that’s where everything you need is available. “Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, and the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.”

3. LIVING WITH COMPASSION One aspect of Buddhism that I found to be especially compelling was the teachings on compassion. The Buddha was known as the “compassionate one,” and according to religion scholars, his moral teachings bear a close resemblance to those of Jesus, who told his followers at the Last Supper: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” In a similar vein, the Buddha said, “Just as a mother would protect her only child at the risk of her own life, even so, cultivate a boundless heart towards all beings. Let your thoughts of boundless love pervade the whole world.” In the Buddhist view, the best way to cultivate compassion is to be fully present in the moment. “To meditate,” said the Buddha, “is to listen with a receptive heart.” In her book Start Where You Are, Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron contends that meditation practice blurs the traditional boundaries between self and others. “What you do for yourself—any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself—will affect how you experience the world,” she writes. “What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.”

“Basketball is a sport that involves the subtle interweaving of players at full speed to the point where they are thinking and moving as one.”

In basketball, as in life, true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment, not just when things are going your way. Of course, it’s no accident that things are more likely to go your way when you stop worrying about whether you’re going to win or lose and focus your full attention on what’s happening right this moment. The day I took over the Bulls, I vowed to create an environment based on the principles of selflessness and compassion I’d learned as a Christian in my parents’ home; sitting on a cushion practicing Zen, and studying the teachings of the Lakota Sioux. I knew that the only way to win consistently was to give everybody- from the stars to the number 12 player on the bench–a vital role on the team, and inspire them to be acutely aware of what was happening, even when the spotlight was on somebody else. More than anything, I wanted to build a team that would blend individual talent with heightened group consciousness. A team that could win big without becoming small in the process.

Tribal Leadership

The book Tribal Leadership by management consultant Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright had a tremendous impact on Phil. In the book, they lay out the five stages of tribal development, which they formulated after conducting extensive research on small to midsize organizations. Although basketball teams are not officially tribes, they share many of the same characteristics and develop along much the same lines:

STAGE 1—shared by most street gangs and characterized by despair, hostility, and the collective belief that “life sucks.”
STAGE 2—filled primarily with apathetic people who perceive themselves as victims and who are passively antagonistic, with the mindset that “my life sucks.” Think The Office on TV or the Dilbert comic strip.
STAGE 3—focused primarily on individual achievement and driven by the motto “I’m great (and you’re not).” According to the authors, people in organizations at this stage “have to win, and for them winning is personal. They’ll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. The mood that results is a collection of ‘lone warriors.’”
STAGE 4—dedicated to tribal pride and the overriding conviction that “we’re great (and they’re not).” This kind of team requires a strong adversary, and the bigger the foe, the more powerful the tribe.
STAGE 5—a rare stage characterized by a sense of innocent wonder and the strong belief that “life is great.” (See Bulls, Chicago, 1995–98.)

11 Mindful Leadership Principles

The basic principles of mindful leadership that I’ve evolved over the years to help transform disorganized teams into champions. You won’t find any lofty management theories here. With leadership, as with most things in life, the best approach is always the simplest.

1. LEAD FROM THE INSIDE OUT

In my quest to come to terms with my own spiritual yearning, I experimented with a wide range of ideas and practices, from Christian mysticism to Zen meditation and Native American rituals. Eventually, I arrived at a synthesis that felt authentic to me. (Similar to John Wooden developing his Winning Philosophy after 16 years) And though at first I worried that my players might find my unorthodox views a little wacky, as time went by I discovered that the more I spoke from the heart, the more the players could hear me and benefit from what I’d gleaned. All journeys in life are inner…

2. BENCH THE EGO

I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became (very Tao Te Ching). I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority. Paradoxically, this approach strengthened my effectiveness because it freed me to focus on my job as keeper of the team’s vision.
Some coaches insist on having the last word, but I always tried to foster an environment in which everyone played a leadership role, from the most unschooled rookie to the veteran superstar. If your primary objective is to bring the team into a state of harmony and oneness, it doesn’t make sense for you to rigidly impose your authority.

3. LET EACH PLAYER DISCOVER HIS OWN DESTINY

One thing I’ve learned as a coach is that you can’t force your will on people. If you want them to act differently, you need to inspire them to change themselves.
I’ve always been interested in getting players to think for themselves so that they can make difficult decisions in the heat of battle. Michael Jordan used to call the team’s collective “think power.”
My approach was always to relate to each player as a whole person, not just as a cog in the basketball machine. That meant pushing him to discover what distinct qualities he could bring to the game beyond taking shots and making passes. How much courage did he have? Or resilience? What about character under fire?

4. THE ROAD TO FREEDOM IS A BEAUTIFUL SYSTEM

When I joined the Bulls in 1987 as an assistant coach, my colleague Tex Winter taught me a system, known as the triangle offense, that aligned perfectly with the values of selflessness and mindful awareness I’d been studying in Zen Buddhism.
What attracted me to the triangle was the way it empowers the players, offering each one a vital role to play as well as a high level of creativity within a clear, well-defined structure.
With the triangle you can’t stand around and wait for the Michael Jordans and Kobe Bryants of the world to work their magic. All five players must be fully engaged every second—or the whole system will fail. That stimulates an ongoing process of group problem solving in real time, not just on a coach’s clipboard during time-outs. When the triangle is working right, it’s virtually impossible to stop it because nobody knows what’s going to happen next, not even the players themselves.

5. TURN THE MUNDANE INTO THE SACRED

As I see it, my job as a coach was to make something meaningful out of one of the most mundane activities on the planet: playing pro basketball. Despite all the glamour surrounding the sport, the process of playing day after day in one city after another can be a soul-numbing exercise. That’s why I started incorporating meditation into practices. I wanted to give players something besides X’s and O’s to focus on. What’s more, we often invented rituals of our own to infuse practices with a sense of the sacred.
We used to perform a ritual that I borrowed from football great Vince Lombardi. As the players formed a row on the baseline, I’d ask them to commit to being coached that season, saying, “God has ordained me to coach you young men, and I embrace the role I’ve been given. If you wish to accept the game I embrace and follow my coaching, as a sign of your commitment, step across that line.” The essence of coaching is to get the players to wholeheartedly agree to be coached, then offer them a sense of their destiny as a team.

Like any great leader creating a vision and a sense of hope, you can achieve that vision is essential.

When people have a boss who makes them feel hopeful about the future, they are more committed to their jobs. Specifically, when Gallup asked followers whether their leader at work (typically a manager) made them enthusiastic about the future, of those who said yes, 69 percent were engaged in their jobs, scoring high on a measure of involvement in and excitement about their work. These engaged employees are the products of hopeful leadership. They are more innovative and productive than others, and they are more likely to be with the company for the long haul. Of those followers who said their leader did not make them enthusiastic about the future, a mere 1 percent were committed and energized at work. If you lead you HAVE to inspire hope.

6. ONE BREATH=ONE MIND

To get the players to settle down, I introduced them to one of the tools I’d used successfully with the Bulls: mindfulness meditation.
Though mindfulness meditation has its roots in Buddhism, it’s an easily accessible technique for quieting the restless mind and focusing attention on whatever is happening in the present moment. This is extremely useful for basketball players, who often have to make split-second decisions under enormous pressure. I also discovered that when I had the players sit in silence, breathing together in sync, it helped align them on a nonverbal level far more effectively than words. One breath equals one mind.
Another aspect of Buddhist teachings that has influenced me is the emphasis on openness and freedom. The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki likened the mind to a cow in a pasture. If you enclose the cow in a small yard, it will become nervous and frustrated and start eating the neighbor’s grass. But if you give it a large pasture to roam around in, it will be more content and less likely to break loose.
I’ve also found that Suzuki’s metaphor can be applied to managing a team. If you place too many restrictions on players, they’ll spend an inordinate amount of time trying to buck the system. Like all of us, they need a certain degree of structure in their lives, but they also require enough latitude to express themselves creatively.
“Create structure so you can have freedom. Create your weather so you can blow in the wind. Map your direction so you can swerve in the lanes. Clean up so you can get dirty. Choreograph, then dance. Learn to read and write before you start making up words. Check if the pool has water in it before you dive in. Learn to sail before you fly.”

7. THE KEY TO SUCCESS IS COMPASSION

In his new adaptation of the Chinese sacred text Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell offers a provocative take on Lao-tzu’s approach to leadership: I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are the greatest treasures.
1. Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
2. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are.
3. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world. Compassion has been the most important. I think it’s essential for athletes to learn to open their hearts so that they can collaborate with one another in a meaningful way.

8. KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE SPIRIT, NOT ON THE SCOREBOARD

Management guru Stephen Covey tells this old Japanese tale about a samurai warrior and his three sons:
The samurai wanted to teach his sons about the power of teamwork. So he gave each of them an arrow and asked them to break it. No problem. Each son did it easily. Then the samurai gave them a bundle of three arrows bound together and asked them to repeat the process. But none of them could. “That’s your lesson,” the samurai said. “If you three stick together, you will never be defeated.”
When a player isn’t forcing a shot or trying to impose his personality on the team, his gifts as an athlete most fully manifest. Paradoxically, by playing within his natural abilities, he activates a higher potential for the team that transcends his own limitations and helps his teammates transcend theirs. When this happens, the whole begins to add up to more than the sum of its parts.
Most coaches get tied up in knots worrying about tactics, but I preferred to focus my attention on whether the players were moving together in a spirited way.
My confidence grew out of knowing that when the spirit was right and the players were attuned to one another, the game was likely to unfold in our favor.

9. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO PULL OUT THE BIG STICK

In the strictest form of Zen, monitors roam the meditation hall, striking sleeping or listless meditators with a flat wooden stick, called a keisaku, to get them to pay attention. This is not intended as punishment. In fact, the keisaku is sometimes referred to as a “compassionate stick.” The purpose of the blow is to reinvigorate the meditator and make him or her more awake in the moment.
Once I had the Bulls practice in silence; on another occasion, I made them scrimmage with the lights out. I like to shake things up and keep the players guessing. Not because I want to make their lives miserable but because I want to prepare them for the inevitable chaos that occurs the minute they step onto a basketball court.
Similar to Josh Waitzkin’s principle “being at peace in the chaos”, “Because we ultimately don’t want to be meditating in a flower garden. We want to be able to meditate and have a meditative state throughout our lives – in a hurricane, in a thunderstorm, when sharks are attacking you – any moment.”
Jackson’s advice to Luke Walton about becoming a coach “I know you’re thinking about becoming a coach someday. I think that’s a good idea, but coaching isn’t all fun and games. Sometimes no matter how nice a guy you are, you’re going to have to be an asshole. You can’t be a coach if you need to be liked.”

10. WHEN IN DOUBT, DO NOTHING

Basketball is an action sport, and most people involved in it are high-energy individuals who love to do something—anything—to solve problems. However, there are occasions when the best solution is to do absolutely nothing.
On a deeper level, I believe that focusing on something other than the business at hand can be the most effective way to solve complex problems. When the mind is allowed to relax, inspiration often follows.
“The unconscious mind is a terrific solver of complex problems when the conscious mind is busy elsewhere or, perhaps better yet, not overtaxed at all.” That’s why I subscribe to the philosophy of the late Satchel Paige, who said, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.”

11. FORGET THE RING

And yet as a coach, I know that being fixated on winning (or more likely, not losing) is counterproductive, especially when it causes you to lose control of your emotions. What’s more, obsessing about winning is a loser’s game: The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. The ride is a lot more fun that way.
That’s why at the start of every season I always encouraged players to focus on the journey rather than the goal. What matters most is playing the game the right way and having the courage to grow, as human beings as well as basketball players. When you do that, the ring takes care of itself.

Developing a System

Keys- teach how to execute the fundamentals, focus on the details, depersonalize criticism, create a learning organization, design a beautiful system to start, it must be reliable, there HAS to be a clear purpose, everyone must become a teacher of the system.
Tex Winter was a master at this. He had developed a whole series of drills to teach players how to execute fundamentals. He trained them to create the right amount of spacing between one another on the floor and to coordinate their movements according to a basic set of rules. The genius was in the details, and it didn’t matter whether you were Michael Jordan or the lowest rookie on the team; Tex would badger you until you got it right.
His system depersonalized criticism. It gave me the ability to critique the players’ performance without making them think I was attacking them personally.
The beauty of the system—and this applies to all kinds of systems, not just the triangle—was that it turned the whole team into a learning organization. Based on this language it seems like Phil most likely read or worked with Peter Senge and his book The Fifth Discipline (maybe my favorite business book ever).
The road to freedom is a beautiful system.
Another aspect of the system I liked was its reliability; it gave the players something to fall back on when they were under stress. They didn’t have to pretend to be like Mike and invent every move they made. All they had to do was play their part in the system, knowing that it would inevitably lead to good scoring opportunities.
The system also gave players a clear purpose as a group and established a high standard of performance for everyone.
Even more important, it helped turn players into leaders as they began teaching one another how to master the system. When that happened, the group would bond together in ways that moments of individual glory, no matter how thrilling, could never foster. When I took over as head coach, I made it a policy to give Michael a lot of space. I took care to create a protected environment for him where he could relate freely with his teammates and be himself without worrying about intrusions from the outside world.

Creating a Culture of Selflessness & Mindful Awareness

I wanted to create a culture of selflessness and mindful awareness at the Bulls. To do that, I couldn’t just rely on one or two innovative motivational techniques. I had to devise a multifaceted program that included the triangle offense but also incorporated the lessons I had learned over the years about bonding people together and awakening the spirit.

Basketball is a great mystery. You can do everything right. You can have the perfect mix of talent and the best system of offense in the game. You can devise a foolproof defensive strategy and prepare your players for every possible eventuality. But if the players don’t have a sense of oneness as a group, your efforts won’t pay off. And the bond that unites a team can be so fragile, so elusive.

Oneness is not something you can turn on with a switch. You need to create the right environment for it to grow, then nurture it carefully every day.
What the Bulls needed, I decided, was a sanctuary where they could bond together as a team, protected from all the distractions of the outside world. I prohibited players from bringing family and friends to our training facility, except on special occasions. I also restricted the media from observing practices. I wanted the players to feel that they could act naturally during practice without having to worry about doing or saying something that might show up in the papers the next day.
Lakota warriors always gathered in circular formations because the circle was a symbol of the fundamental harmony of the universe. As Black Elk, the famed Lakota wise man, explained it: Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are the stars. . . . The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood-to-childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.
For the Lakota everything is sacred—including the enemy—because they believe in the fundamental interconnectedness of all life.

Circle of Love

Circle of Love- after more than forty years involved in the game at the highest level, both as a player and as a coach, I can’t think of a truer phrase to describe the mysterious alchemy that joins players together and unites them in pursuit of the impossible.
It takes a number of critical factors to win an NBA championship, including the right mix of talent, creativity, intelligence, toughness, and, of course, luck. But if a team doesn’t have the most essential ingredient—love—none of those other factors matter.

“When a player surrenders his self-interest for the greater good, his fullest gifts as an athlete are manifested. He’s not trying to force a shot, or do something that’s not in his repertoire of basketball moves, or impose his personality on the team. It’s funny—by playing within his natural abilities, he activates a higher potential beyond his abilities, a higher potential for the team. It changes things for everybody. All of a sudden, the rest of the team can react instinctively to what that player is doing. And it just kind of mushrooms out from there—the whole begins to add up to more than the sum of its parts.”

Coaching Staff

We didn’t agree on everything, but we did develop a high level of trust and a commitment to modeling the sort of teamwork that we wanted the players to embrace.
But what I’ve learned over the years is that the most effective approach is to delegate authority as much as possible and to nurture everyone else’s leadership skills as well. When I’m able to do that, it not only builds team unity and allows others to grow but also—paradoxically—strengthens my role as leader.
When I’m hiring coaches, my strategy is to surround myself with the strongest, most knowledgeable people I can find and give them a lot of room to express themselves.
That allowed us to share information with one another and make sure we were all on the same page in terms of day-to-day strategy. Each coach had a high level of autonomy, but when we talked to the players, we spoke as one.

Foster an Environment for Individual Expression

Phil was heavily influenced by Psychologist Carl Rogers and his groundbreaking ideas on personal empowerment which changed how Phil viewed leadership.
Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, was an innovative clinician who, after years of experimenting, developed several effective techniques for nurturing what he called the “real self” rather than the idealized self we think we’re supposed to become. The key, he believed, was for the therapist to create a relationship with the client focused not on solving a problem but on nurturing personal growth.
The paradox, he writes in his seminal work, On Becoming a Person, “is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up.”

I don’t pretend to be a therapist. But the process Rogers describes is not unlike what I’ve tried to do as a coach. Rather than squeeze everybody into preordained roles, my goal has always been to foster an environment where the players can grow as individuals and express themselves creatively within a team structure. I wasn’t interested in becoming best friends with the players; in fact, I think it’s important to maintain a certain distance. But I tried to develop genuine, caring relationships with each player, based on mutual respect, compassion, and trust.

Transparency is the key. The one thing players won’t stand for is a coach who won’t be honest and straightforward with them.
One of the hardest jobs of a coach is keeping the role players from undermining team chemistry.
I’m not a big hugger or someone who doles out praise easily. In fact, some people find me aloof and enigmatic. My style is to show appreciation with subtle gestures—a nod of recognition here, a touch on the arm there. I learned this from Dick McGuire, my first coach on the Knicks, who used to come by my locker after games and quietly reassure me that he was looking out for me and would try to give me more time during the next game. As a coach, I tried to convey to each player that I cared for him as a person, not just as a basketball factotem. The great gift my father gave me was showing me how to be genuinely compassionate while also commanding people’s respect.

Getting Inside the Mind of the Players

I was always looking for new ways to get inside the players’ heads. When I started coaching the Bulls, I had the players create what I called a personal shield, a simple profile based on questions such as
1. “What’s your greatest aspiration?”
2. “Who’s influenced you the most?”
3. “What’s something people don’t know about you?”
Later I asked them to fill out a more formal questionnaire and used their answers to probe more deeply during our one-on-one meetings midway through the season.
Many coaches seem to tell their players, “I’ll do the thinking; you don’t have to think.” Jackson, though, wants his players thinking and questioning.
Jackson possesses a wide array of mental powers and a remarkably persuasive touch with his players. Phil is great at defining roles and having people face up to what the hierarchy is.
These mind games come in such variety that many times the people around Jackson proceed through the game without even being aware that they are participating, that he has engaged them in it. “There’s meaning in everything, and why things are done not everyone always knows,”
Bill Wennington explained. “Phil is a really deep thinker, and everything he says seems to have a lot of thought put into it. Most of the things he says have at least two meanings, and at times you have to figure out which one he means. But that’s part of Phil. He wants you to think; he wants you to figure out what’s going on. He doesn’t want you to do things just by rote, and he uses that term a lot. He wants you to think and know what’s going on and why you’re doing things.”

Social Bull’s-Eye

One of Phil’s favorite psychological tools was one June called a “social bull’s-eye,” which creates a picture of how people see themselves in relation to the group.
I’d give each of the players a sheet of paper with a three-ring bull’s-eye, representing the team’s social structure, in the center. Then I’d ask them to position themselves somewhere on the bull’s-eye based on how connected they felt to the team. Not surprisingly, the starters usually placed themselves somewhere near the eye, and the backups scattered themselves in the second and third rings.
My intention was to give the players the freedom to figure out how to fit themselves within the system, rather than dictating from on high what I wanted them to do. Some players felt uncomfortable because they’d never been given that kind of latitude before. Others felt completely liberated.
So in my second year as head coach I created a new position for Scottie—“point forward”—and had him share the job of moving the ball up court with the guards—an experiment that worked out far better than I expected. That switch unleashed a side of Scottie that had never been tapped, and he blossomed into a gifted multidimensional player with the ability to break games wide open on the fly. As he puts it, the shift “made me the player I wanted to be in the NBA.”

Jackson pulled together an array of influences to shape Jordan’s mental approach to performing under the intense pressure that comes with high-stakes situations. “Phil is the master of mind games,” -Michael Jordan
“We saw his skills, but you’ve got to be around him every day to see the competitiveness of the guy. He was gonna try to take over every situation that was difficult. He was gonna put himself on the line. He enjoyed it. But as much as you talk about Michael’s offensive ability, he’s probably one of the best defensive players to play the game. His anticipation was so great, he could see the floor, his quickness, and then his strength. That’s another thing that’s overlooked, how strong Michael is. He really had the whole package.”
Jackson remembered a bit of his old coach’s wisdom. “Red Holzman had a saying, that the difference between superstars and great players is that a superstar makes everybody on his team a better player,” Jackson would explain later. “I happened to mention that one time when I was an assistant coach, and Doug Collins heard me and said, ‘You gotta go tell Michael that. That’s kind of the penultimate position.’ I said, ‘C’mon. I don’t want to go tell Michael Jordan something that’s just a statement.’ He said, ‘No, no, you really gotta go tell him. I really want you to do it.’”
As Jackson spoke, Jordan gave him something of a bewildered look, although he betrayed nothing of what he thought of the message. “I told Michael about it, and Michael thanked me for it,” Jackson said. “That was one of the most amazing things, that he took it. And that’s one of the best things about Michael Jordan, he’s a great coachable player.”
Jordan’s respect for coaching had prompted him to listen politely, although the subject was a hot-button issue with him at the time, because his critics had offered the opinion that he was not the kind of player to make his teammates better. But Jordan was impressed by Jackson’s directness. It was one of Jackson’s first conversations with the star, among hundreds they would have over the next dozen years.
As an assistant, Jackson had come to appreciate the exceptionally keen nature of Jordan’s mind. As a head coach, he relished the opportunity to fully engage that mind to pursue the goal that both of them wanted badly. He wanted to challenge his player, but only mentally. He wanted to use Jordan’s mind to bring about the discipline that the Bulls so badly needed.
Jackson suspected that Jordan would respond to a mental challenge, if it was issued on a daily basis—not issuing directives as Collins had, but suggesting paths and leaving Jordan and his teammates free to choose.
“He has more psychological sayings to make you think about things,” Jordan observed in those early days. “He reminds me of Dean Smith a lot. Dean used to play a lot of mind games. Both of them make you think about your own mistakes. Instead of yelling at you, Phil makes you think about it and you eventually realize that you made a mistake. That type of psychological warfare sometimes can drive a person crazy, yet it can drive you to achieve, too. I like mind games, so Phil is great for me.”

Quiet The Mind

But what I discovered playing for the Knicks is that when I got too excited mentally, it had a negative effect on my ability to stay focused under pressure. So I did the opposite. Instead of charging players up, I developed a number of strategies to help them quiet their minds and build awareness so they could go into battle poised and in control.
The first thing I did with the Bulls was to teach the players an abbreviated version of mindfulness meditation based on the Zen practice I’d been doing for years.
I wasn’t trying to turn the Bulls into Buddhist monks. I was interested in getting them to take a more mindful approach to the game and to their relationships with one another. At its heart, mindfulness is about being present in the moment as much as possible, not weighed down by thoughts of the past or the future. According to Suzuki-roshi, when we do something with “a quite simple, clear mind . . . our activity is strong and straightforward. But when we do something with a complicated mind, in relation to other things or people, or society, our activity becomes very complex.”
What I discovered after years of meditation practice is that when you immerse yourself fully in the moment, you start developing a much deeper awareness of what’s going on, right here, right now. And that awareness ultimately leads to a greater sense of oneness—the essence of teamwork.
“To hear the unheard, is a necessary discipline to be a good ruler. For only when a ruler has learned to listen closely to the people’s hearts, hearing their feelings uncommunicated, pains unexpressed, and complaints not spoken of, can he hope to inspire confidence in the people, understand when something is wrong, and meet the true needs of his citizens.”
To strengthen the players’ awareness, I liked to keep them guessing about what was coming next. During one practice, they looked so lackadaisical I decided to turn out the lights and have them play in the dark—not an easy task when you’re trying to catch a rocket pass from Michael Jordan. Another time, after an embarrassing defeat, I had them go through a whole practice without saying a word. Other coaches thought I was nuts. What mattered to me was getting the players to wake up, if only for a moment, and see the unseen, hear the unheard.
But the most effective way to deal with anxiety, I’vediscovered, is to make sure that you’re as prepared as possible for whatever is coming your way. Train “On the other side of pain”
There’s a story I love to tell about how Napoléon Bonaparte picked his generals. After one of his great generals died, Napoléon reputedly sent one of his staff officers to search for a replacement. The officer returned several weeks later and described a man he thought would be the perfect candidate because of his knowledge of military tactics and brilliance as a manager. When the officer finished, Napoléon looked at him and said, “That’s all very good, but is he lucky?” I believe that if you’ve taken care of all the details, the laws of cause and effect—not luck—will usually determine the result. Of course, there are plenty of things you can’t control in a basketball game. That’s why we focused most of our time on what we could control: As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Invisible threads are the strongest ties.”

But I learned a key lesson: how important it was to relate to each player as an individual, with respect and compassion, no matter how much pressure I might be feeling.

Interfere as little as possible. “Rules reduce freedom and responsibility,” “Enforcement of rules is coercive and manipulative, which diminishes spontaneity and absorbs group energy. The more coercive you are, the more resistant the group will become.” Leaders should practice becoming more open.
“The wise leader is of service: receptive, yielding, following. The group member’s vibration dominates and leads, while the leader follows. But soon it is the member’s consciousness which is transformed, the member’s vibration which is resolved.”
This is what I was trying to do with the Bulls. My goal was to act as instinctively as possible to allow the players to lead the team from within. I wanted them to be able to flow with the action, the way a tree bends in the wind. That’s why I put so much emphasis on having tightly structured practices. I would assert myself forcefully in practice to imbue the players with a strong vision of where we needed to go and what we had to do to get there. But once the game began, I would slip into the background and let the players orchestrate the attack. Occasionally I would step in to make defensive adjustments or shift players around if we needed a burst of energy. For the most part, though, I let the players take the lead.
To make this strategy work, I needed to develop a strong circle of team leaders who could transform that vision into reality. The structure is critical. On every successful team I’ve coached, most of the players had a clear idea of the role they were expected to play. When the pecking order is clear, it reduces the players’ anxiety and stress. But if it’s unclear and the top players are constantly vying for position, the center will not hold, no matter how talented the roster.

Self-actualization

Maslow’s work opened a door for me to think more expansively about life. I was particularly drawn to his insights about how to get out of your own way and let your true nature express itself. Later when I became a coach, I found that Maslow’s approach of balancing physical, psychological, and spiritual needs provided me with a foundation for developing a new way of motivating young men.
Much of my thinking on this subject was influenced by the work of Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology who is best known for his theory of the hierarchy of needs. Maslow believed that the highest human need is to achieve “self-actualization,” which he defined as “the full use and exploitation of one’s talents, capacities, and potentialities.” The basic characteristics of self-actualizers, he discovered in his research, are spontaneity and naturalness, a greater acceptance of themselves and others, high levels of creativity, and a strong focus on problem-solving rather than ego gratification.
To achieve self-actualization, he concluded, you first need to satisfy a series of more basic needs, each building upon the other to form what is commonly referred to as Maslow’s pyramid. The bottom layer is made up of physiological urges (hunger, sleep, sex); followed by safety concerns (stability, order); love (belonging); self-esteem (self-respect, recognition); and finally self-actualization. Maslow concluded that most people fail to reach self-actualization because they get stuck somewhere lower on the pyramid. In his book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Maslow describes the key steps to attaining self-actualization: experiencing life “vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption”; making choices from moment to moment that foster growth rather than fear; becoming more attuned to your inner nature and acting in concert with who you are; being honest with yourself and taking responsibility for what you say and do instead of playing games or posing; identifying your ego defenses and finding the courage to give them up; developing the ability to determine your own destiny and daring to be different and non-conformist; creating an ongoing process for reaching your potential and doing the work needed to realize your vision. fostering the conditions for having peak experiences, or what Maslow calls “moments of ecstasy” in which we think, act, and feel more clearly and are more loving and accepting of others.

Helping the Players in their Self-discovery Process

My goal was to get the players to break free from their confining basketball cocoon and explore the deeper, more spiritual aspects of life. By “spiritual” I don’t mean “religious.” I mean the act of self-discovery that happens when you step beyond your routine way of seeing the world. As Maslow puts it, “The great lesson from the true mystics is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard.”
To tap into the sacred in work as well as in life, it’s essential to create order out of chaos.
Native American songwriter James Yellowbank, says, “The task of life is to keep your world in order.” And that takes discipline, a healthy balance between work and play, and nourishment of mind, body, and spirit within the context of community—values deeply rooted in my own being, as well as my objectives for the teams I’ve coached.
In the preseason I’d invited George Mumford (Mumford’s The Mindful Athlete book recap, highly recommend), a sports psychologist and meditation teacher, to join us at training camp to give the players a mini-workshop on coping with the stress of success. But a few days before George arrived, Michael announced his retirement, and the team was going through an identity crisis. So George talked about the two aspects of every crisis: danger and opportunity. If you have the right mind-set, he said, you can make the crisis work for you. You have the chance to create a new identity for the team that will be even stronger than before. Suddenly, the players perked up.
The word “mindfulness” has become so diluted in recent years that it’s lost much of its original meaning. It comes from the Sanskrit word smriti, which means “remember.” “Mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment,” writes Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. This is an ongoing process that is not limited to the act of meditation itself. “Sitting and watching our breath is a wonderful practice, but it is not enough,” he adds. “For transformation to take place, we have to practice mindfulness all day long, not just on our meditation cushion.” Why is this important? Because most of us—basketball players included—spend so much time bouncing back and forth between thoughts of the past and the future that we lose touch with what’s happening right here, right now. And that prevents us from appreciating the deep mystery of being alive.
As Kabat-Zinn writes in Wherever You Go, There You Are, “The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded.”
The key, he said, was not just to sit and calm your mind but to learn to read and react effectively in any situation based on what’s happening at that very moment.

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge. TULI KUPFERBERG

There’s a Zen saying I often cite that goes, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” The point: Stay focused on the task at hand rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.

The Enemy’s Gift

Looking back, I think my struggle with Jerry Krause taught me things about myself that I couldn’t have learned any other way. The Dalai Lama calls it “the enemy’s gift.” From a Buddhist perspective, battling with enemies can help you develop greater compassion for and tolerance of others. “In order to practice sincerely and to develop patience,” he says, “you need someone who willfully hurts you. Thus, these people give us real opportunities to practice these things. They are testing our inner strength in a way that even our guru cannot.”
Similar to Jim Dethmer’s everyone’s an Ally from Conscious Leadership)
The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks about letting go as an opportunity for true awakening. One of her favorite sayings is “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing,” writes Chodron. “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
There’s nothing like a humiliating loss to focus the mind.

“To be successful you have to like to lose a little less than everybody else”

Go carve your own path…