--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Ryan Hanley Show. Today we have a pretty epic episode for you. We're joined by Alan Stein Jr., who is a professional performance coach, a speaker, has trained some of the biggest names in the NBA in college, worked at one of the most prestigious NBA factory high schools, DeMatha High School down in Washington, D.C. He's now a speaker who takes the lessons that he learned from training Kobe Bryant and LeBron James and Kevin Durant and applies them to the corporate world through speaking and workshops.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Alan is an absolute treasure. He's dynamic. We get into all kinds of topics that are applicable to your life and to your business. It is a real treat that we're able to have Alan on the show and I hope you'll give Alan your time and attention because you will not be disappointed.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get to Alan though, we got to pay the bills with the fine sponsors that make this show possible. This is a commercial enterprise. This takes work. It takes capital to make this podcast happen so that it's free for you. We need sponsors, and we have two tremendous sponsors today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The first is Tarmica. Tarmica is the rating platform, commercial lines, maybe personal lines in the near future. We'll see. Wink, wink, nod, nod. But Tarmica is taking over our space from a commercial lines rating perspective. Their technology is wide open. It's fast. It's built by insurance agents for insurance agents. This is true indie technology, indie tech, as Seth Zaremba would say. Tarmica, T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com, should be on your radar. I know changing raiders can be a hassle, and I'm not asking you to do that today. But absolutely put Tarmica on your radar and keep your eye on it. If there is a need or you do start to feel pain and you're looking for something new or you want to give a new tool a try, Tarmica is the rater, is the storefront platform that I would take a look at. We thank them for being a sponsor of the show.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Our second sponsor are the fine, fine people at Advisory Evolved. Advisory Evolved makes tremendous insurance agency focused websites, but "websites" kind of does them a disservice. Advisory Evolved creates tools for your business, new business generation tools, retention tools. It's so much more than just a website, than just some pretty pictures and words on the internet. At a ridiculously reasonable rate for tremendous service, the look, the feel, Advisory Evolved will be the provider for Rogue Risk, my agency. If you're looking for a website, I highly recommend that you give Advisory Evolved a try. Go to advisorevolved.com. That's advisorevolved.com. Take a look. I recommend that you do. Tremendous, tremendous websites.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: With that, guys, appreciate you sticking with me because Alan Stein Jr. is about to blow your mind. Here we go.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When I first came across you in particular, it was in the Speak and Spill Facebook group, which is my absolute favorite place. There are days when I'm like, how did I even get invited into this group? The people are just so smart and driven and supportive and fun. I saw some of the things you're doing and I checked out your Twitter. I see these professional athletes and I see what you're talking about. I'm like, this dude lives like the coolest life in the world. He's hanging out with the coolest people. For everyone listening at home, if they're not familiar, and we're going to get into all this stuff, just give a little bit of background on where you've come from, how you've gotten to where you are today.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Sure. The only reason I'm going to go back to the beginning is for context. I fell in love with the game of basketball at probably four or five years old. I bring that up because at the time of this recording, I'm going to turn 44 in a couple of days. I'm so thankful that four decades after I found my first passion, it's still a major staple in my life. I consider myself incredibly grateful and fortunate to have lived a life around my passion for the game of basketball.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Even though my actual vocation has changed a few different times, I spent 20 years on the court as a basketball performance coach, working with some elite level players and learning from some elite level coaches. Three years ago, I decided to leave the court and get onto stages and into boardrooms to share my message with folks in the corporate world. I share all of the lessons that I've learned through the game of basketball. Even though I'm not in the training space anymore, I'm still very in touch with the game. I'm still talking about all of the lessons and principles and strategies, mindsets and rituals and routines that elite basketball players use to perform at a high level. I teach folks in their respective businesses how to apply those same lessons. Basketball is still a major part of who I am and what I do. I'm so thankful for that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's tremendous. I was actually a high school basketball referee for 12 years.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Oh, nice.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I saw the game as a player in high school. I played college baseball because I wasn't a good enough basketball player to keep going on with basketball. I went back to it because I love the game so much. I love the way it moves as a ref and did that for 12 years. Now I coach my kids. Not to the level that you do, but I share your passion for this sport. I think it's tremendous.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: I tell you what, and I say this with all due respect, if you were a referee for 12 years, you have to have a passion for basketball or a passion for helping young people. You want to talk about a thankless job. One broad stroke of advice to almost every coach or parent listening is just leave the referees alone. They're doing the best they can with the skills they have. They're there to help give your child or your player the best experience. If you did that for 12 years, then I know you love the game.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: A couple on refs. This is what I always tell them because when people find that out, they usually say, everyone's got these misconceptions. I don't even want to say misconceptions. Every ref has a different skill set just like every player. That's one of the things. Just because you all wear the same striped shirt, everyone shows up and goes, well, that guy's just as good as that guy. That's often not the case. You can often have on a game, especially at the high school level, but in the college level as well, because I went to a lot of D1 camps, you have guys on the court that could be very drastically different experience and talent levels, even though they're in the same game.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The other side is, refs absolutely positively have a bias. They always do. Because they're human beings.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Yeah, exactly.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's one of the things that I've never understood. Even if it's unconscious, if I'm standing there and you are just harassing me, and something happens, even if I am trying to be as unbiased and professional and honest as you can, you can't help but pay a little more attention to that kid who's always talking back to you or is always doing some dirty things. You can't help it. That's what I've always understood. You're putting yourself on my radar, which is the last place that you want to be. That's probably a good life lesson. Just don't mess with people.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It was a very interesting experience, man. I loved that game. I'm sure for the same reasons that you were in as long as you were. The kids are just phenomenal. Even as they get older, college kids are just awesome. They're just so much fun to be around.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Absolutely. I love that you brought that up. I've never been a referee, so I've got the playing and the coaching and even the parenting vantage point. But I love that you brought that up. I have the empathy and humility and compassion to acknowledge that referees are human beings. Why would it not register to a coach that if I'm going to give you a hard time and bellyache and complain over every missed call, that's eventually going to work against me? On some level, you're going to not want to give me that 50-50 call or do something in my favor.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Same thing with players. Why do players and coaches expect referees to be perfect when neither one of them are even close to perfect? A player yelling that you missed a call. Yeah, I might have missed that one. You've also missed your last four shots, and I had nothing to do with that, and they were wide-open layups. I wasn't yelling at you for missing shots. Why are you yelling at me because I happened to miss a call?
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: What I'm really fascinated by, especially watching the NBA, where those referees are phenomenal.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, no, they are.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: You're watching in real time, and you're like, oh, he missed that. They go back, and they show the replay, and the referee was usually right about 98% of the time. You're like, oh my gosh, he nailed that in real time with the biggest, fastest, strongest players in the world. He still got it right. It's really remarkable.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Those refs operate in flow at a level that I don't think people understand. People look at LeBron or whoever and they're like, oh, he's in flow. What they don't understand is those refs too, to be in that moment and make those calls the way that they do, you have to be able to drop into a flow state. Otherwise, there's absolutely no way you can keep up with that game. You just couldn't do it. It's happening so fast.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Going from a really good high school game to the college game, it's light years. It's logarithmic in terms of its pace. Then to go to the NBA, they are in a different state of mind. That game is happening in their head so much slower than it is if you or I were standing there. Obviously it's the same for a really good player as well. That's happening for those refs. For most high school refs, that's not the case. Those guys oftentimes are like, well, I have no idea.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It was interesting seeing the game, having played it for so long in high school, then coming back after college and seeing the game from that side. It's a really interesting vantage point. I almost wish it would be a good exercise for coaches in particular to spend some amount of time earlier in their career. One, you learn intricacies about the game that you can't see from the sidelines. You're able to stand in positions on the court and see angles of plays that when you're in the coach's box, you actually don't have that vantage point. Just the visual would be positive for them.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Oh man. Anyone listening, I hope you just hit rewind for a second and listen to what Ryan just said, because that was laced with so much gold and so many things to unpack. I'm sure we're steering a little bit off course of what was intended, but I think this is going to be very valuable. There's a couple of things that just struck a nerve with me in a great way.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: One is all of us should be looking to step outside of our direct craft and what we do to learn other things. I absolutely think it should be mandatory for all coaches to take referee seminars or even to referee summer league games to give them some empathy and some compassion for when they're going to deal with referees in the winter.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Speaking of outside the box, I'm a full-time professional speaker and I do watch other speakers because I want to get good at my craft. But I spend more time watching hip hop and standup comedy. I love those two art forms. I watch and devour so much of that stuff because I believe both of those art forms have something they can teach me to become a better professional speaker. Whether it's the physicality of it or varying my tone and inflection. I'll never be a hip hop artist and I'll certainly never be a standup comedian, but I can learn from them. I think anyone listening to this, if you only study and look inside your very narrow world of what you do, you're missing opportunities to grow and develop.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, keep going. Keep going.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: So profound was it's easy when you watch NBA players, they make it look so easy what they do because they're so gifted and talented that we don't appreciate the pace at which they move, how explosive they are, even how big they are. If you watch NBA games on TV and you look at a guard and you're like, yeah, he looks like a little guy, that little guy's probably 6'4", 210 pounds. On TV, he looks little because he's next to some Goliaths, but it's all relative.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: The fact that most referees are of normal human stature like you and I are, and the fact that they're able to run up and down the court with guys that are 6'8", 260 pounds with no body fat that move like a freight train for 48 minutes and to always have themselves in position to at least make a call is absolutely extraordinary. We forget that.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: The last thing I'll say is, I would hope that a referee's number one goal is, as you mentioned, everyone's going to be biased, but you do your best to remain unbiased. You do the best you can to be in the right place, to have the right angle to make the right call. Whether or not you make the right call is a different story, but you should have enough hustle and a good enough attitude that you're just trying to be in the right place at the right time to do the right thing.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: I think that's a lesson for all of us. If all of us would concern ourselves with our own effort and our own attitude and trying to make sure that we're in the right place at the right time to do the right thing for the right person, most times things will work out favorably for yourself. With that referee analogy, you just unpacked a tremendous amount of gold that everyone should be able to learn from.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: See, guys, I do know what I'm talking about. Just listen to him.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I wrote this post a long time ago when I first stopped reffing. There were a bunch of lessons that I learned from reffing, but there were two things in particular that I've carried with me. I've been out of it for five years because my son is six. The two most important lessons that I took away were one, emotional control and how important emotional control is in hectic situations in particular. A good mentor in the refereeing space will teach you that as the crowd and the players and the coaches go up, you have to push yourself down. You have to become more controlled because you can't add to the hecticness of that environment. You have to be the anchor.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you get a steel breakaway hammer dunk at home, the place is going to be going bananas. What you can't do is allow your heart rate to elevate to match that situation. You have to be able to control your emotions. You don't want to swallow them, but you want to own them. That was really the best advice that was ever given to me. It's not like you're a Zen master bringing your heart rate down, but owning the fact that you have control over how you react to that situation.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The second thing was, if you referee the game by the book, you will get eaten alive. You have to know how to do it. You have to know that on a drive to the hoop, you sidestep in and you step back so that you have a sharper angle, but more breath. That's the standard move when you see someone drive to the hoop that a ref will make. Except what if a secondary defender comes in or a guard drops in and is now going to try to take a backdoor charge? Or what if the guy goes past the standard layup and now he's going to go do an up and under? Where do you play that? You could be upside down, twisted on the side. [For those watching on YouTube, I'm acting it out.] At the end of the day, all that matters is you get the angle.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You have to know the rules or know the guidelines or know what you're supposed to do and then be able to break off of that to get what actually has to be done. The lesson that I took from that is the only way to know which rules to bend or break is to know what the rules are and be good at them in the first place.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Wow. If I'm hearing you correctly, here's how I process that. You're saying refereeing is both an art and a science. You have to have the science of knowing specifically what the rules are and best practices. But there is an art to being able to look at those nuances and to adapt and be flexible because what's going on in any specific game situation might call for something else. I think that's a brilliant way to put it. It's true in coaching. It's true in any area of our life. You're always going to have the best practices and the science behind it, but then you have to be adaptive and reflexive to be able to change.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: It's the same thing in coaching. There are some standard best practices of what one should do to be a basketball coach, but then there's also an art and a feel to it. I think the best referees are the ones who have a feel for the game and a flow and they're consistent in what they do. Maybe you're going to allow both teams to play a little bit more physically than someone else would prefer, but you're going to allow that level of physicality throughout the whole game. You're not going to call hand-checking really tight in the first quarter and then just let it completely go away for the second quarter. There's a consistency to that.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: All of these things you're bringing up are tenets of high performance. To be a high performer in any area of life, you have to understand both the art and the science and where they blend together. All of these things, I hope, also give higher empathy and compassion to how hard these different areas are.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: When I'm working with businesses, I say all the time, lots of times a business has their different silos. You've got your sales folks, you've got your leadership team, you've got people in R&D, you've got the front desk manager. Everyone just stays so narrow into what they do. They forget to have empathy and compassion for the other silos, which everyone has to blend together in order for the game or the business to succeed.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: That's why we say all the time, players should play, coaches should coach, officials should officiate, and parents should just sit there and be supportive. As soon as anyone tries to do someone else's job, then we have a problem. Of all of those groups, the referees are usually the ones that do the best job of just doing their job. You never see a referee trying to tell a player what they should be doing with their footwork. You never see a referee insert themselves in the huddle and call a new play. They do their job. But how many times do we see coaches trying to officiate as well or parents in the stands trying to coach? Everyone just needs to stand in their lane, do their job, and have a strong appreciation and respect for the other three pillars.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The coaches, I'll be honest with you, as much as refs get a lot of garbage flowing at them, coaches have it the worst. You've got to deal directly with the parents and with the players. You've got it coming at you from both ends.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Yeah, they have it the worst. There's no doubt.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now that I am a coach, I'm doing bitty ball where the hoops are like half height. I'm not quite at that point yet. Hopefully I'll keep coaching my son as he evolves. I'm already like, oh boy, because I'm getting, well, my son got three rotations instead of four rotations. I'm like, he's six. What are we talking about?
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Let's get off that. One last thing. I don't mean this for this to be any type of shameless plug, but because I've spent my entire life in elite athletics and I now have three children that are all playing sports, I've got a self-published book that's coming out in a few months. It's called *The Sideline: The Ultimate Guide to Youth Sports Parenting*. It's basically a guideline to hopefully give parents some tools to stay in their lane and create an environment that's fun for kids. A big portion of that is for parents not to coach from the sideline, not to push their children too hard. Just create an environment that makes it fun for them. Definitely lay off the coaches and lay off the referees. Just enjoy the fact that your child has found something they love to do and be as supportive as possible in making that a fun experience.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: I only bring that up because having spent my entire life in youth athletics, it is becoming a problem. Parents, unfortunately, as well-intentioned as they are, are taking a lot of the fun out of the game. We're seeing an alarming number of statistics of kids quitting sports earlier and earlier. Their number one reason every single time is from adult interference. The vast majority of those adults are the parents. I love parents. I am a parent. I know how much they love their children. But they need to start making some tweaks because they're starting to pollute what would otherwise be arguably the best platform for kids to learn life.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I could not agree with this more. When I got out of basketball, in that 10 year span which started when I was reffing down in Washington, DC around 2004, and I got out in 2015, I experienced what I believe the transition from the kids being held responsible for their actions to them not being held responsible.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When I played high school, I played football, baseball, and basketball. When I was playing football, I got a personal foul for a late hit which was obvious and intentional. I was 17. I deserved the flag. My coach walked out onto the field, shoulder pressed me by my face mask, threw me into the sidelines and wouldn't allow me to come back on the field for an entire quarter. To a 17 year old starter on a football team, that was like having my heart ripped out of my chest. Not the throwing or the physical part, but the not being able to play.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Today, that same type of action gets a, "Why did you throw that flag? Now we're going to attack the refs. What's wrong with you? Why wouldn't you let my son back in the game?" My dad made me run laps around our neighborhood when I got home from the game because of what I did during the game. There was no, "You're not wrong, they shouldn't have done that to you."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: In that 12 year period, I watched that mentality shift. Now you have kids spiking basketballs, kicking basketballs, getting technicals, pushing and shoving. The coaches and the refs are blamed for the kids' actions instead of the kids. That is pervasive today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We'll have *The Sideline* wherever people can register for it. I want you to tell them where they can get it, download it, buy it, whatever it is. I want to push that because I believe so strongly in youth sports. It has shaped who I am as a person. If there are resources that we can put in people's hands to help sculpt these tools, youth sports are tools for children to become quality adults, then I want to get those in their hands. We'll let everyone know where they can get that and we'll have it all linked up.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: I will. It's so in its infancy right now that we don't even have the domain finalized. I'll make sure I shoot you that information when it's ready.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you do, you email me and then I'll send it out to my email list and let everyone know about the book when it's ready.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: I love it. I'm with you 100%. The things we can and should learn from youth sports carry over and bleed over to every area of our life. It's still the same principles. I speak to Fortune 100 companies now. Most of what I share, I translate it in a different language, but most of what I share are basic principles that I hope my children are learning through sport. Things like accountability and putting in work during the unseen hours and never making excuses, blaming others or complaining, holding yourself fully responsible for everything that you do and how important preparation is. All of us as adults should unite to get kids to play more sports and to have a great experience. If collectively we can do that, it's good for society, but it's certainly good in our own backyards with our own children.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: 100% agree. Let's transition a little bit. That was tremendous. I want to talk about your transition, your thought process in going from being on the court as a performance coach, performance trainer, helping these elite athletes, and moving towards being a speaker and moving towards the boardroom, which is a whole different arena, I guess, to keep the sports analogy going. Talk to me about the mentality to do that. That couldn't have been an easy transition. Your life is this and you transition it, even if it's something you wanted, it's never easy. I'm interested in that move. Where did it come from? What was the motivation?
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: The motivation was really, I don't want to be overdramatic and say I was getting burnt out on the basketball training portion, but I could see myself heading in that direction. I've grown up with such a respect for teachers and coaches. I think they are the epitome of servant leaders. I have such a profound respect for each of those crafts that I believe that all teachers and coaches should be 100% in service of the players and teams they work with. If you find yourself not as passionate, then it's up to you to leave and get out because you owe it, especially to the young people you work with, to do everything in your power for their development and their betterment.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: I found that I wasn't as excited to be in the gym or on the court or in the weight room as I had been in years past. I have high enough self-awareness that a red flag started to go up. I was like, Alan, something's wrong here. You used to love this. It seems like you're losing a little bit of the love. Simultaneously, instead of being concerned with sets and exercises and reps and periodization and all of the training, I was so much more fascinated with leadership and how do you build championship cultures and develop cohesion. How do you create the type of loving accountability and standards that allow an organization to thrive? That was really what was occupying my passion.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: I decided to rip the bandaid off all at once and say, I'm going to leave the direct space that I'm in of basketball. I'm going to leave the direct vocation that I'm in, which is teaching players to run faster and jump higher. I'm just going to pivot slightly to a new audience, the corporate world. I'm going to start sharing stuff that I'd learned outside of how do you run faster and jump higher.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Because when I looked back on my breadth of work, I was so lucky to be around such amazing players and coaches who taught me the tenets of leadership and accountability and cohesion and holding yourself to excellence. I just decided that I wanted to take that stuff and start sharing it with other groups that I felt would really benefit if they applied it. So that was kind of how I steered my ship.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I spent a good portion of my time in basketball speaking at basketball clinics. So being up in front of people and talking has always been something I've enjoyed doing. So even though I'm only entering my fourth year as a professional speaker by trade, I've been speaking professionally for probably 15 years, but only now in the corporate space. So it was less of a leap than many people may think because it's not like I had this set nine-to-five job and I just walked in and quit and decided I was going to be a speaker the next day. There were a lot of natural parallels between what I was doing and what I'm doing now.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The biggest thing that made that leap somewhat easier was I'm a relationship guy and I had built some really amazing relationships with people in the basketball space who, once I told them of my pivot, were able to open doors for me in the corporate world. I can't tell you how many times a high school coach would reach out and say, "Hey Alan, I'm so-and-so. I coached down in Mississippi. I've really loved your work for the last few years. Now that you're in the corporate space, I want to introduce you to my brother-in-law who happens to be the VP of sales at so-and-so corporation. They're always looking for speakers. Let me give them your information."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So the basketball community, in full support, really rolled out the red carpet and made some introductions that allowed me to start getting the ball rolling. And then as you know, and any professional speaker knows, that's just what gets the momentum to start. Now you've got to create it by being good and by having some outreach and creating new relationships. So it was all kind of the perfect storm, but relatively speaking, it was a pretty smooth transition and I'm very grateful for that.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Yeah. What was the most surprising thing for you in terms of the speaking business?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, the most surprising thing—let me start on the corporate side. I was surprised, and now I realize that I'm a little bit jaded because the two high schools that I worked for here in the Washington DC area—Montrose Christian, which is where Kevin Durant graduated from, and DeMatha Catholic High School, which is where Victor Oladipo graduated from. My first basketball game I ever reffed in my life was at DeMatha High School.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Was it really?
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Oh, wow. Look at you. That's big time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Versus St. John's.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: St. John's? What's the one over in—they're in Maryland, the one Catholic school league team in Maryland there. St. John's?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, St. John's. That's who it was.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: That's huge, man.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The freshman game. Yeah.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Wow.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, both of those schools I worked at for 13 years combined, and we have over a dozen players in the NBA right now. So I preface that by saying those are two really elite-level schools, and they both had elite-level coaches. I sometimes would take for granted that Mike Jones is the coach at DeMatha and he's as good as any coach I've ever seen at any level in any sport. I guess I just got numb to the way that he did things because I just assumed that everyone in the world had a practice plan when they went into a meeting. I just assumed everyone in the world clearly defined everyone's roles for everyone on the team.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And I go into the corporate world and I'm working with Fortune 500 companies who don't do the same things that a high school basketball coach does. So I was actually shocked that some of these groups have been able to attain incredible success, and yet some of the fundamentals and building blocks weren't even in place. I would sit in on corporate meetings, and I'm like, "This is the biggest waste of time. There's no organization. There's no plan. This meeting could have been wrapped up in eight minutes, and we're sitting here at minute 38 right now. This is a waste of resources."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't say that to diminish those groups, and I don't want to make it sound like I could run a Fortune 500 company, but it just let me believe that it doesn't matter where you're coming from. Someone that has the traits of a high performer and has standards of excellence are things that we can all learn from. To be able to say, "When you come into a meeting, you should have a practice plan detailed to the minute of what the goal of the meeting is, who needs to be there, how much time we're going to allot spending on what." That just seemed like a no-brainer to me.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Yeah.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But it's not always common in regular life. So to me, that was kind of a surprise. And as far as the speaking business in general, I don't know that anything really surprised me. That's only because the moment I got in it, I insulated myself with amazing people like the folks in Speak and Spill who kind of showed me the ropes and told me what to expect and have really dropped the breadcrumbs that I've been able to follow to matriculate up. But so far, I mean, I love what I do now. The speaking business is so perfect for me in my life right now. I just absolutely love it.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Yeah. I always, when people ask me about—so one, it's funny how small the world is that you coached at DeMatha.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: I reffed in DC for four years before I moved back up here to Albany, New York. My fourth year there, I did 475 games in one basketball season. It was the best basketball. I tell people all the time, when I came back to upstate New York—and nothing against upstate New York, we just put Kevin Huerter in the NBA, you know what I mean? I reffed Kevin, great kid, great basketball player—but it was like slow motion up here compared to the Washington DC area. The way basketball is played there is like college basketball, even at the JV level, and the way that it's coached is so much different.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: When you talk about being spoiled, when I left, even though that's a contentious, hard-fought, incredibly competitive league down there, the quality that happens even from a coaching standpoint—when you leave there, you're spoiled because all of a sudden you have these hacks telling you how to do your job, these country bumpkins. It's just funny how small the world is. I love reffing down there. That's cool.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: But so, the thing about speaking that I've always said to people was—people ask me, "How do you like it? Why do you like it?" It's the closest thing to sports as a kid that I've been able to find as an adult. That feeling of electricity that you have, being in front of an audience, performing for them—like Michael Port talks about it, you're not doing a speaking engagement, it's a performance. To me, it's the closest thing that I've been able to find. I haven't coached at a high level. I'm sure if I get to coach my kid, there could be some fun. But when you're out in front of an audience, 500, 700, a thousand people, and they're all looking at you and you're trying to give every ounce that you have to them, it's the closest thing to being in the batter's box or making that shot at the end of the game. It's the closest thing you can get as an adult.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Oh, absolutely. I think that's one of the reasons I find it so intoxicating. It fills many of those same memories that I had as a player and even as a coach. I actually choose to approach speaking very similarly. I call it my pregame routine. My pregame routine before I take the stage is similar in framework to what I used to do to prepare for a game. Now, clearly, I don't necessarily have to do a ton of stretching before I take the stage, but I do something physical to get some energy out. I make sure that I'm getting good sleep the night before. I have my uniform. The things that I choose to wear on stage, I don't wear anywhere else because I like the feeling of knowing when I'm putting this on, it's game time. It's just like you don't wear your jersey out during the week. You put it on when it's time to prepare and time to play.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Same thing, I have a pregame meal. Depending on whether I'm giving a morning keynote or an evening keynote, those things will vary. But I prepare and have the same routine and rituals for every speaking engagement, just like an athlete would to prepare. I don't know at the time of this recording if the Lakers are playing tonight, but I know that if the Lakers have a game tonight, LeBron has a very specific schedule of what he does on game day, starting from the moment he wakes up to the moment the jump ball is thrown up. There's nothing haphazard about that schedule. It's taken him years probably to fine-tune that to make sure that he performs at a high level.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: LeBron's not walking around the streets of LA four hours before tip-off going, "I wonder what I'm going to eat this afternoon. Do I feel like Mexican food or Chinese?" No, he knows exactly what he's going to eat, when he's going to eat it, when he's going to get to the arena, what stretches he's going to do, when he's going to take the court, what he's going to do. He knows all of that because that's what high performers do. They create consistency through mindsets and rituals and routines to perform at the highest level. So when you say that speaking is as close as guys like us can get to playing sports, you are 100% right on, and I choose to approach it that way.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Yeah, I think I'm with you. I do the same thing. I have a whole routine that I go through. Again, it all varies morning, night. You never really know. But yeah, no, I do the same thing. Just like you said with the LeBron example—and this is probably the closest similarity that I have to LeBron—it has taken me years to kind of define what that is in trial and error. Do I like to eat close to the speaking time? Do I want to keep some space? Do I want to fast before it? How much coffee do I want to drink? How hydrated do you want to be? You kind of trial and error these things. And as you find them, you make sure that you are consistent with it.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: I have these crazy notebooks where I just write things down, and whether I actually ever go back and look at the note or not, writing it down burns it into the brain. And then you repeat, repeat. I'm a hundred percent with you. What I find interesting, and I'm really interested in your take on this because I want to take this into *Raise the Game*, your book, but why? So we've talked about this habitual performance preparation in terms of sports, which makes a lot of sense, and then in speaking, even it doesn't feel like a big stretch. But then when we have a really important sales call or meeting or whatever, we just kind of mow some donuts, show up, and hope everything goes well.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. And that is a major problem. One of the things that makes high performers high performers is consistency of output. Now, any speaker will tell you that they're not at a 95 out of a hundred every time they take the stage. We're human beings, so we're fallible. There have been times that I've gotten off the stage and thought, "That just wasn't the best I was capable of." Hopefully the audience doesn't know it, but I know it inside. Then there are other times I get off the stage and think, "Man, that is the best performance I have ever had." The goal is to make sure there's a minimal gap between the two. The consistency of preparation is what will determine the consistency on the stage.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys like you and I know that if the performance we give on stage is dependent upon how we feel, what we want to do, whether it's convenient in our schedule, whether we had a flight delay or not, we can't let all of those parameters dictate what we do on the stage. The same thing is true in sport. And I'm glad that you're taking it to this place with the same thing if we use sales as an example. You need to create a template and a process and a system and a routine to prepare for every sales call, every sales meeting, everything that you do that is client or customer facing. You should have templates for different types of emails that you send out. You should have a standardized process for following up with prospects. And then once they become a client, what are some of the standard timelines of when you're going to follow up with them? Are you actively reaching out to anticipate their needs?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Our good friend from Speak and Spill, Phil Jones, talks all the time about telling is not selling. So are you working on the basics of asking insightful questions and being an active listener? Those are the fundamentals. If you want to be a great basketball player, then you work on your footwork religiously. Well, if you want to be good in sales, you learn to become an insightful question asker. I don't even know if that's a word, but you learn how to ask insightful questions and to be able to navigate conversations in that way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What I tell sales professionals all the time that I work with, I ask them, "How much role-playing do you do?" And they usually look at me like I just grew a second head. It's like, well, why would you not practice different scenarios with a colleague that you're more than likely going to face when you're in front of a customer? Why would the first time you hear this objection be when you're in front of a prospect and not something that you're doing in practice?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the things that makes Mike Jones at DeMatha so great is every single practice, there is a component dedicated to working on fundamentals—shooting and passing and ball handling drills. There's a component that works on competition—teaching players how to compete against each other, whether it's shooting drills or one-on-one drills or three-on-three. And then there's what he calls "time and score" where he creates game-like scenarios. He says, "All right, blue team, you're up three points. It's white team's ball, and there's a minute 37 seconds left. Joey, you have three fouls on you. White team, you have one timeout. Blue team, you have no timeouts. Let's just play the remaining 1:37 on the clock." It puts players in a position to practice the scenarios they're going to see.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If there's three seconds left in a game and DeMatha's going to inbound the ball under their basket, whatever inbounds play they call, they've done that a million times in practice. This won't be the first time that they've tried it at a sold-out game against St. John's where Ryan Hanley's refereeing. This is a game that they've practiced. I want to say the same thing for sales. You should have a system and a process and standards for every aspect of the sales process. You should practice role-playing. You should practice listening. There are so many of these things. If you do that, you will consistently outperform sales professionals that don't. Will you still find some times where a customer comes up with an objection that you weren't prepared for? Yes. But you've narrowed the number of times that will happen if you're actually practicing. I think the utility between sports and sales is almost as high as the utility between sports and professional speaking.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Why do you think people don't do that? Why is that not intuitive for some people?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One, it takes a lot of work. It's a lot of preparation. I know that most basketball players, once they've reached a certain level, feel that they're above the fundamentals. They feel that, "Well, I'm in college, I don't need to go back and work on my left-hand dribbling. I don't need to work on my footwork because I'm pretty good because I'm in college." Well, one thing I learned being around Kobe Bryant and LeBron James and KD and Steph Curry—those guys never leave the basics. They'll spend 10 to 15 minutes working on pivoting drills to make sure that their footwork is flawless so that they can then level up and build on top of that. I'm not saying they only do the fundamentals. I'm saying the fundamentals are a staple of their preparation and then they level up. They practice all of these things because that's the only way that you get good at anything. The only route to skill mastery is repetition, repetition, repetition.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I think part of it is sales professionals thinking, "I'm pretty charismatic. I'm a good-looking guy. People like me. I can talk my way into most situations. I can pretty much just show up for this sales meeting tomorrow. I'm sure I'll knock it out of the park." And maybe in history, they've done that pretty successfully. But if they would go back and do the little things and have more preparation and do role-playing and ask insightful questions to vet the prospect, they'd perform at an even higher level. I think it's a combination of some just don't know because they haven't made the connection between practice and play. Some of them don't want to do it because they feel like it's beneath them. "I've been selling for 20 years. Do you really think I'm supposed to role-play every Monday morning for 30 minutes? That sounds a little stupid."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Oh, it may be, but if Kobe Bryant's willing to get in the gym at four in the morning during the off-season and work on pivoting drills, I think a little role-playing with your sales colleagues every Monday morning for 30 minutes is more than appropriate.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Yeah. That was a game changer for me in my career as a salesman. It was two things really. I started listening to my father-in-law who I was working for at the time. He's a master salesman. What I did was I stopped fighting the way that he sold and I started literally just sitting in his office and listened to him take phone calls and just listened and listened and listened. Then I took his stories and I started morphing them into my own and we role-played off of each other. Some of the younger guys in the office, we would tell stories back and forth. None of the stories were even our own. They were all just these morphed stories from my father-in-law who was their boss. That process really took all of us to the next level. It was a breaking point in our careers where all of a sudden our hit rates started going up because we armed ourselves with stories to respond to common objections. And we told those stories over and over and over.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: A good friend of mine who you probably also know is Marcus Sheridan.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Oh yes.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Yeah. He pounds me over the head every time we see each other. He says, "You don't need new stories. You just need to get better and more consistent at telling the stories you have. Just get sharper and better at the stories. People want to hear the same stories over and over again because each time they take a little more out of it." I think the same thing is true for your prospects. If you're selling insurance or whatever you're doing, get better and better at those fundamental aspects, whether it's a sales story or overcoming an objection or walking an employee through a difficult situation or combativeness at work. It's just refining those things. You don't need to always look for the new shiny thing. We're all guilty of that. That was really a breaking point in my career when I started role-playing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. Well, think about this. I am by no means a sales expert. I'm not a salesman other than I've owned my own businesses my entire life, so I've had to sell to some degree. But I'm no Marcus Sheridan, I'm no Phil Jones, I'm no Ian Altman. But I've learned from those guys. My commitment to craft—let's say we've got a midsize business and you have 10 sales professionals that sell either your service or your product. You can't convince me that one of the most valuable things you could do would be to set aside one hour a week. Just one hour during the entire work week. For the sake of argument, let's say it's Monday morning at nine. No one is ever going to schedule calls Monday morning at nine. We're all going to meet, and here's the practice we're going to go through.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This practice could have a variety of components. One, it could definitely have some role-playing. So maybe as the team leader, you have 10 index cards with 10 different potential objections or scenarios and you're going to randomly pass those out and let folks pair up. One time you're the salesperson, one time you're the prospect, and work through those. Then everybody come back together and share some of the things that worked and share some of the things that didn't.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Another component could be—everyone had a certain number of sales calls this past week. Can someone share some of the things that worked really well in those calls? What's something out of the ordinary that either you did impromptu or you've been doing regularly that really helped you close the deal? Because I don't want to take for granted that your other nine teammates know what it is that you did that works. I want you to share that and pour into them. Conversely, did anyone hit a stumbling block or step on a landmine? Did anyone get caught with their pants down with a prospect and realize they asked you an objection you weren't prepared for? Can you share that with the group? Let's discuss.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Something else would be—and of course, this would only be if it's allowed and permissible—but maybe you record your sales call and then you play it in front of the team and let the team break it down like you're breaking down game film. "Okay, here's some things Alan said during this call that he did really well with. Here's a couple of times he stepped on his own feet and got in the way and maybe created some friction with the prospect." But it's something that everyone can learn from.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you were to take that one hour and work on the fundamentals of sales in general—and this could also be adding in, "We've got a new product available, so let's talk about how this is integrated with our other products. Let's come up with a list of the best questions to ask prospects to see if they're the right fit." Work on this stuff all of the time. All it would take would be one hour a week, and I think you'd see a tremendous increase in output and performance from those 10 sales professionals just by practicing those basics and being open enough and vulnerable enough to share the things that work and the things that don't.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Yeah, and I think the key there—because I 100% agree from a management perspective—is creating the space that allows them to have those conversations in a constructive way that isn't judgmental. Sometimes, especially if you're in an alpha situation—not just alpha male, but alpha female, alpha male, just an alpha situation—that can be difficult to do. But to me, that sits on management, leadership, whoever is responsible for that conversation. If you can create that space, I think people want to open up about these things. They just don't know when it's appropriate. A lot of times we don't want to feel weak.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: One thing that I appreciate about our culture in general versus when we were kids, because we're basically the same age, is that you can be more open in environments like that. It is much more acceptable, which is an enormous positive of our society. But it's still, especially in sales or those types of situations, you kind of have to let people bring—as a leader, if you can bring your guard down, that will allow others to feel safe to bring their guard down. That's how those things happen.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. But you have to create that—as you said, the key word—a safe environment. And you also have to get to know your people. If I'm the manager and you're one of my 10 sales professionals, and I found through spending time with you and connecting with you that you feel embarrassed and emasculated if I break down your film in front of the group, then I simply won't do that with you because that's actually going to decrease your performance, not increase it. So this also goes into—you treat everyone on your team fairly, but you don't treat everyone equally. Where I, on the other hand, might say, "Hey guys, you can tape every one of my calls and you can put the damn thing on YouTube if you want, because I don't care. As long as I get information that's going to allow me to get better, it doesn't matter to me." But this is when we've got these customized individual differences.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One other aspect to that team practice would be with the concept of team. I know this is challenging in many sales environments because you and I work for the same company, but we each have our own quota and it's kind of wired into the compensation package that I get more money when I hit my numbers. So it kind of creates this "me versus you" instead of "me and you." And that's not good for the bottom line of the company. If you're my teammate, I should want to do everything I can to help you hit your quotas and make sure you're facilitating sales. Even if occasionally that means I lose the prospect because you signed them to the account and I didn't, overall, it will still work out best if we're all enriching and empowering each other.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Another thing would be just talking to the team and saying, "All right, who do I know or what can I do that adds value to any of you? Ryan, you're trying to close this deal with this company over here. I might have some contacts that can help you do that. I'm not going to see any commission for that. I'm not going to get anything, but I'm going to help you do it because you mean something to me because you're my teammate." When we create that type of atmosphere, it's just human nature that at some point you're going to turn around and go, "Well, Alan, you've done me a solid on these last two accounts I've closed. I actually know someone that can help you with who you're working with." And we all get better for it. Creating a safe atmosphere where it's not "me versus you," it's "me and you" in sales is incredibly important to the fabric and culture of the organization.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Well, Alan, we could go all day.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We sure could.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: I want to be respectful of your time and that of the audience. This has been absolutely tremendous. We've gone so many different places, which is my favorite type of podcast episode. I want to do two things, or three things actually. I want to direct people to your book, *Raise the Game*. Where can they get that?
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: If they go to raiseyourgamebook.com, that's okay. If you raise your game, you will raise the game. If you go to raiseyourgamebook.com, you can get the book. If anyone wants to order it for your whole organization, I can offer a 42% discount on a team order and I can even sign each copy. And then I just released a facilitator guidebook and a team member workbook that allows you, if you want to do a book study with your group or your organization, to really bring the principles of the book to life and put them in action. And then if anyone's interested in speaking or anything else I have going on, you can just go to allensteinjr.com. I'm at allensteinjr.com on all the major social platforms and love engaging with folks. So if anything Ryan and I talked about today, from refereeing to sales performance, struck a chord, hit me up on social. I'd love to continue the dialogue.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That was going to be the next thing I said. For everyone, for all my insurance friends out there who run events in our space, if you remember a few years ago, I introduced you all to Marcus Sheridan and he ran through the industry and did all the events. You all should be hiring Alan as well. You're going to get the same quality performance with a different perspective. But the level of value and quality is exactly the same. So I'm hoping that some of you will pick up Alan for your next event. I'm always willing to do a breakout session underneath him or whatever.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Absolutely. That's tag team at UNI, man. I don't know that there's an event out there that could take both of our energy.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dude, I made the mistake of following Marcus one time. I literally have a clause in my contract now that says I will not speak directly after Marcus Sheridan ever again. No, I don't have that. But no, I just encourage everyone, the group that we keep referencing, Speak and Spell, Alan comes incredibly highly recommended inside that group. Go watch his YouTube videos. And I hope that some of my insurance friends out there who are listening to this, that you guys will have a chance to interact with him live. Dude, it has been such a pleasure, man. Thank you for giving us the time that you have. Hopefully we'll be able to connect in person in the future.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Can I tell one real quick story?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Please do.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: All right. It now jogs my memory that you said you did the DeMatha-St. John's game way back in the early 2000s. Because now I vividly remember after the game, Coach Jones went into the referee's locker room and he saw a cell phone that was laying there and he figured one of the referees left it. And I said, "I think it was probably Ryan's phone." And he said, "Oh, it was definitely Ryan's phone." And I said, "Well, how would you know?" And he said, "Well, it had 17 missed calls."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. There you go. Very good.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: Boom. Perfect exit.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Awesome. I appreciate you, brother.
--:-- Alan Stein Jr.: All right, man. Be good.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yep. Thank you.
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