The Mirror Of Motivation With Dre Baldwin

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

Nothing ever gets better when you stop trying. Think about that the next time it gets hard to gain the motivation to keep going, when it feels as if giving up is the path of least resistance. Professional basketball player, keynote speaker and podcast host Dre Baldwin wants to spread this simple but powerful message to the world through his book, The Mirror of Motivation. Joining John Livesay on the show, Dre drums in the importance of listening to your inner voice as opposed to constantly comparing yourself to others, of doing the work as opposed to sitting down and waiting for free lunch. Be it in sports, business or any endeavor in life, these timeless principles will help you work on your game to get that win you’re going after. Listen in and be inspired to be mentally tough like Dre, all day.

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Listen to the podcast here

The Mirror Of Motivation With Dre Baldwin

Our guest is Dre Baldwin, who went from his high school bench to a nine-year professional basketball career in just five years. Dre has published over 15,000 pieces of content. His daily Work On Your Game podcast has over three million listeners. He’s given over four TEDx Talks and authored 27 books. One we’re going to be talking about is The Mirror of Motivation. Dre, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here and get into it.

Before we jump into your story, I need to give you a shout-out for a creative, innovative way to get on my radar, to be a guest on my show. I’m sure you know as a host, you’re often getting, “Hit up. Can I be on your show?” A lot of people have somebody else pitching them sometimes or they make the mistake of saying, “Here are all my great accomplishments,” as opposed to, “Here’s what I can bring to your audience.” You took it a step further and created a custom video. How did I know it was custom? You said my name more than once. You looked at my show. Let’s start there and then we’ll go backwards a bit on how’d you get at that idea. It’s such a great example of your work in action.

How I got that idea is I’ve always done things that don’t scale when I started my business, when I was going even back. I was looking to play professional basketball, a lot of people don’t know how the pro basketball world works, especially overseas. It’s not like I was LeBron James with the scouts coming to me. I had to go to the scouts. I had to pitch myself to them to get on their radar in the first place, to get an agent. An agent works in sports the same way they work in modeling or movies. They are the connect. I had to sell myself to an agent to get an agent interested in pitching me to the overseas teams. I had to learn how to reach out to each individual agent because I tried to think how they’re thinking. The same way with someone like yourself, an agent is getting a literary agent, for example, or a movie agent or basketball agent.

Every day, they’re getting hundreds of emails from people who want the agent to do something for them. I’m thinking to myself, “How can I separate myself from all of these other individuals who are copy and pasting the same message? What can I do?” I approached my work from that angle. It worked in basketball. I didn’t do it in the literary world. The one traditional publisher that I did work with, came to me, luckily enough. My podcast is a solo podcast. I don’t even have guests on my show. I get those emails that you mentioned.

They look up any podcasts, copy and paste and send that message and then they follow up, they got their whole funnel sequence. I’m like, “I don’t need guests on my show. You keep emailing me.” I’m sure you get plenty of them because you have guests. I’m saying, “How can I separate myself from all these other individuals? What can I do that they won’t do?” It’s to individually talk to each individual host because most people are not willing to do that. Even if I’ve put it on a billboard and told everybody exactly what I do, 2% of people are going to do it.

You gave us so much value right off the get-go. The one that gave me chills is something that Michael Phelps said almost word for word. I don’t know if it’s an athlete thing or what, but when I was selling advertising to Speedo and I convinced them to advertise with me and get Michael Phelps, who was on this payroll at the time to show up at the event, I walked up to him because I used to be a competitive swimmer. I said, “Everyone says you’re so great because of your physique. Your feet are like fins. You got a big lung capacity. I know enough about success that there’s something else going on.” He said, “My coach asked me when I was young if I’d work out on Sundays.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “We got 52 more workouts than your competition.”

[bctt tweet=”The inner voice doesn’t shout. You’ve got to listen to it intently so it doesn’t get drowned by the louder outside voices.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I took that little story, Dre, and I tell audiences when I give talks, “What are you willing to do that your competition isn’t willing to do?” You said that almost word for word. I’m completely blown away by that lesson you learned. Even if you show people what to do, they still won’t do it to get to that Olympic level. That’s why many people are afraid of sharing their intellectual property or their tips and secrets. I’m like, “Unless you’ve got someone to hold you accountable and/or tweak what you’re doing, it’s still not something people can do or execute.” Let’s use that as the thread for your own story here. Take us back. You’re on high school, you’re not even playing, give us a sense of your height. Basketball is all around the taller you are, the more likely you are to have an advantage.

I was maybe 6’2” in high school. I got a bit taller after college.

You’re 6’4”, you’re in high school. You would think, “Why are you on the bench?” Somehow, what were you willing to do that the other high school athletes weren’t?

In high school, what was I willing to do? I was willing to keep going. When we’re kids, we are very impressionable. Adults are impressionable as well. Social media has up engineered that. As kids, being that we’re impressionable, when we try something and it’s not working, one of the things that we use is we’re thinking about what everybody else is thinking? We know that everybody else sees us trying and failing. A lot of young people, eventually say, “Let me stop trying so I start failing in front of everybody.” You have been a swimmer, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m sure you knew other swimmers who had at least as much skill as you and as much access to resources as you. They didn’t want to keep trying because they didn’t want to look like they were losing, first of all, to their peers, who probably weren’t thinking about them as much as we think they are into ourselves because we don’t want to keep trying.

In high school, I didn’t accomplish anything. I sat on the bench, but I kept going. I kept working on my game that summer after high school, then I walked on and played in college. I didn’t set the world on fire in college, but I played. After college, I said, “Let me keep going. Let me go try to make it as a pro.” The older you get, if you’re tasting these “dreams,” the more ridiculous you look to the people who are being “realistic.” Because I was willing not to let “reality” stop me from going after what I wanted, that was the thing that separated me from a lot of people who had at least as much talent as I had. I’m not Kobe Bryant, but I kept working. There are no secrets here. It’s just people aren’t willing to do the work.

You said something that is relevant. When I was a competitive swimmer, there was always somebody who beat me, and in this one race, I beat him. In swimming, you touch the wall and it measures your time to the thousands of a second. They had said, “The reason you won is you stayed focused on the wall.” He took that half a second when he lifted his head up to turn to see if he was ahead or not, and that half a second caused you to win.

That was such a big life lesson for me, Dre. It sounds like what you’ve done. When we focus on our own progress, we win, as opposed to worrying about what other people think of us or telling us that we’re crazy to not give up on this dream that we should’ve given up a long time ago. That’s what I’m hearing you say is, you had the blinders on like a thoroughbred racehorse that stays focused on that goal and doesn’t let all the outside distraction, or even the internal mindset stuff of comparing yourself to other people, which in my opinion is the kiss of death. It stopped you from making that happen.

Gain Motivation: Focus on the sound coming through your bones because that is the voice that’s speaking to you internally.

In basketball, we say it’s a game of inches, but in swimming, it’s probably a game of centimeters. It can come down to that. I’ve done my best work and had my best accomplishments when I was only focused on what I was doing, not focused on what everybody else was doing. Looking into my left and to my right and getting distracted by these applications on my smartphone. I was doing what I needed to do and focusing on me. I tell people, I call it the inside-out method. When you focus on the inside, then everybody from the outside eventually comes to you. When you focus on the outside, all the stuff that’s on the inside, if you’re not putting enough focus there, you’re not going to get anything back. It’s focusing on me.

You and I are both keynote speakers and I’m sure this has happened to you. Either you get a request from a speaking bureau or a client and you know you’re not the only speaker they’re talking to. Why would they? Like everybody does their due diligence, they interview 2 or 3 of everything. What you’re saying in that “interview,” what story are you telling in my world to get them to visualize what it would be to have you there speaking or virtually is everything. I remember once getting a speaking gig and the agent said, “Congratulations, they liked your energy. That’s why they decided to hire you.” I thought it’s rarely that distinct and obvious of what people are buying when they’re hiring us to do anything, job, speaker, consultant, coaching or whatever it is you’re selling. They’re hiring your energy.

Your whole premise of, “We’ve got to work on the inside so that we have something positive and attractive to put out into the world,” as opposed to, “Let me see what that person’s wearing and driving, maybe I’ll feel I belong or be good enough.” If you haven’t dealt with that, I’m a good enough issue, which is an ongoing journey for sure, it’s not what you’re saying, it’s the energy. It’s almost metaphysically quantum physics stuff going on. You talk about that from what I can gather from your TEDx Talk around confidence in particular. Let’s double click on that concept of what do you mean. How do you help people with their confidence and their internal world so that they become hunted instead of them having to do the hunting?

The first thing is they got to stop paying attention to the externalities and paying attention to everything going on outside of themselves. One of the things I talk about in one of my books is the concept of listening to the sound that’s coming through the bones. You have your show and you’re a speaker so I’m sure you’ve listened to recordings of yourself speaking before. What’s interesting is that any human being, when you listen to a recording of yourself, your voice sounds different than the way it sounds when we’re talking. When I’m talking right now, I sound a certain way. When I listen to my own voice, it sounds a bit different. The reason scientifically is because the sound that travels through a microphone or through a computer is traveling through airwaves, and air conducts sound a certain way, so it sounds a certain way to you. When you’re talking and you listen to your own voice, that sound is being conducted through bone because it’s coming from inside of your body up into your ear canal.

The sound that’s traveling through the bone sounds completely different than anything you hear traveling through air. If any other person is speaking that’s not you, it has to travel through the air. Even if it’s in an AirPod right in your ear, there’s still a bit of air it has to travel through to get to you, and it sounds completely different. What I tell people to focus on is the sound coming through the bones, which is the voice that is speaking to you internally. As long as that voice is telling you something, that’s what you need to follow. Some people call those voice instincts. Some people call it a hunch.

The challenge is, especially these days, John, is because we are so inundated, or we choose to be inundated by many voices coming from the outside that it drowns out that internal voice. That internal voice does not shout. It doesn’t yell, it just talks, sometimes only in a whisper. When you’re listening to all these outside voices that speak loudly, everybody has a megaphone, then it drowns that voice out to the point that the voice says, “I’m going to stop talking because this guy is not listening anyway.” That’s the start of it when it comes to building confidence.

The more we do listen to our intuition is another way of describing that but I love what you described. I’ve never heard anybody quite say it like that, “Listen to the sound coming from your bones and why it’s coming from your bones,” your internal voice doesn’t shout. When everyone else is shouting and you’re having a cacophony of noise coming at you based on your lack of filters, then how could you possibly hear it? The irony is when we do listen and start to trust it, we get more messages. That’s been my experience anyway. It’s like anything. Why would someone keep trying to get through to you if you never respond? Whether it’s a person or the relationship we have with ourselves. That’s a key part of this.

[bctt tweet=”The biggest mistake you can do is to stop trying.” username=”John_Livesay”]

You also are all about mental toughness. You have some words that you love so much, you’ve tattooed them on your arm. Energy, persistence, preparation and boldness are the four that I can read. Those are big words on a big bicep. It’s not like they’re microscopic or neither is the arm to be able to hold all those letters. That gives you a sense of your discipline and your focus there. What mistake do you see people are making when it comes to mental discipline and mental toughness?

It’s giving up. The biggest mistake is that they stop trying. My favorite rap album is 50 Cent’s, Get Rich or Die Tryin’. The whole point was, I’m going to keep going until I get to the outcome that I want. A lot of people, John, lived their lives with an “if, then” mindset, “If this works, then I’ll keep going,” but with mental toughness or grit or perseverance or stick-to-itiveness, in this sense, they’re interchangeable. The mentality is, “I’m going to work on this until I get the outcome that I want.” It doesn’t mean you have to have that mindset with everything because there are some times that you do need to walk away.

There are some things that you should quit, but the things that matter the most to you, your mentality needs to be, “I’m going to work on this and try different routes and try different hustles until I get to the outcome that I want.” That’s usually maybe one main thing like Napoleon Hill called the definite chief aim. What is that going to be for you? Figuring out, “What do I need to change in order to get to this outcome?” The outcome that you’re desiring doesn’t change, maybe your approach changes. The biggest failure that people have with mental toughness is that they don’t have any, they give up when things are not working.

If someone says, “I want to get more mental toughness. Maybe I have a little, I could use more. Maybe I’m good, but I’m not at a professional athlete’s level.” What advice or what do you tell them in your talks or your books that allow them to improve that? Is there a secret tip besides just don’t give up? Is there something else that they should try to get some discipline in one area that may be transferred to another?

It’s not even necessarily a secret. It’s an open secret. One is, decide what you want strongly enough that you will be willing to keep going. There’s not going to be everything. What is the definite outcome that you want in your life? A lot of people and you probably have seen this, they don’t have a definite outcome. Napoleon Hill called it drifting. Whichever direction the wind blows, that’s where they’re going. If the wind shifts, then they shift. Where exactly are you going?

Shiny new objects, “Everyone’s in Bitcoin, I should buy Bitcoin. Now I should do that. Everyone’s on this platform, now I should go to this platform.” Pick a lane, people.

Now, it’s Clubhouse. That’s the thing everybody’s running to now. It’s, first of all, figuring out what you’re willing to stick to long enough to get to your outcome. The second thing is strategizing, have a plan, “What do you want to get to and what is your process for getting there?” On top of that, having a strategy, because maybe some people look at strategy and they’re like, “I don’t even know what does that even mean? Where do I begin?” Work backwards. Let’s say you want to have a top-rank podcast. What it needs is to be true. You’d have a podcast. What would it need to be true? You need to be publishing consistently.

Gain Motivation: Decide what you want strongly enough that you’d be willing to keep going just to get it.

What would it need to be true? You need to get yourself a mic, an audio person to help edit, make sure your show notes are correct and make sure you have a schedule of guests so that you’re consistently publishing. What would it need to be true? “Let me go get some artwork done. Let me figure out the name of my show, where I’m going to record and what my format is going to be.” What would it need to be true? “Let me start working on this right now. Let me write down a document so I have these answers to start reaching out to people who would be my guests.” You can do that right now. You would work backwards, asking yourself the same question, what would need to be true for that to happen? Keep working backwards until you get to a step that you can take so now you can see the plan.

Here’s the caveat. Your plan will probably be terrible because as they say, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Even though you have a plan, it doesn’t mean it’s going to work. This is where you find mentors. You find people who are smarter than you. People who have already done it. People who are already doing it, or look at their examples, you don’t even have to know these people. You can just look at them, look at the best podcasts out there, the best authors or the best swimmers, see what they did and borrow from their processes. The great thing about the world we live in now, John, is anyone who’s successful is probably on the internet telling everybody about it. All of their business is out there in the street, all you had to do is listen, read, watch, pay attention and they’re giving you the entire game. All you had to do was get it and apply it, but most people don’t want to do the work. That’s the biggest challenge and we have to sum it up in a sentence.

You have so much content. You have some discipline from your athleticism. Working out every day and practicing your jumps and dunking the ball, but you also are vulnerable, which is valuable that people who don’t pretend like they always have it together or always have had it together, are the ones that allow people to relate to. They see themselves a little bit because that’s what a good story does. It takes us on a journey, rags to riches or whatever the challenge is that you’re facing. You were talking about a time when you felt most like a loser and that you were unemployed and waiting for a phone to ring. Give us a sense of what it felt like, and yet you were able to overcome that huge obstacle somehow.

I had gotten my first job to play basketball overseas. I’m doing all this hustling to get on overseas. I go to an exposure camp. It’s like a job fair for athletes. I played well at that exposure camps. It was like the Combine with the NFL, but for basketball. I played well there. I used the video and the scouting report from that. When I was selling myself to agents, I reached out to a bunch of agents. I got one agent to be interested in me. He signed me to his agency and that agent helped me start my career. I played in Kaunas, Lithuania. That’s where I started my career. When that job was done, I came back home to the United States and I didn’t have another playing job lined up.

I also had no stacked up so much money that I was going to be able to live off that for the rest of my life. I ended up probably, after a month or two back home and got a job at a supermarket. I was working the overnight shift at a supermarket. For people who don’t know what happens during the overnight shift at a supermarket, all you’re doing is taking a bunch of boxes off some truck in the back and you’re restocking the shelves from all the stuff that people bought during the day. The good thing about the job is there is no uniform and you don’t have to talk to anybody. The bad thing is you’re just stocking shelves and you’re eating dust for eight hours straight.

You got to understand, I came from playing professional basketball in Europe, and now I’m stocking shelves at the grocery store. Had I not had the basketball job, it wouldn’t have been bad but because I had the basketball job comparatively, it was terrible. I remember the first night, this is back when we had iPods before the iPhone. My iPod died the first night. For the last three hours, I had nobody to talk to and nothing to listen to. At that point, I felt like this is the worst that it could possibly get. I worked that overnight shift for maybe two weeks. I got a call from my agent and I got my next playing job. I didn’t have to do anything that ever again.

The question was a time when you felt like a loser and what you were willing to do? You don’t know how long that time is going to be between, “I have this job it’s boring. I don’t have anything in common with these people, when is something going to change? What I do know is I’m not going to give up on my dream and I’m not going to sit around and feel sorry for myself. I don’t think I’m too good to get a job that I maybe don’t like.” Humility is important for people to realize that “I’m too good ever to go back and do something. Do you know who I am?”

[bctt tweet=”You can’t get something out of nothing. You have to put in some work to achieve an outcome.” username=”John_Livesay”]

All that stuff is such a turnoff to people and the energy and the world. “I’m doing the work. It may not be the work I want to keep doing, but I’m doing some work. I’m showing myself in the universe that I’m going to take care of myself. I’m going to do what I need to do. This isn’t forever. I don’t know how long it’s going to be.” When we do have moments of, “This isn’t going the way I want.” The lesson I got from reading your blog and hearing you tell that story in the first person. Thank you for sharing that. It will get better, but if we keep working at it. It can’t get better if we stop. That’s my big takeaway.

Let me tell you what I was doing during that time because I’m thinking about it a little bit more. I would borrow my mom’s car to go to work. I will work the overnight shift. I would go to work at 10:00. Get off of work at maybe 7:00. I would drive home. I would drop my mom off at work. She was working at a school as a teacher. I would drive back home and sleep. That would be my sleep time. I slept maybe 4 or 5 hours a night during this time period. Now at 23, you can get away with that. I probably couldn’t do it now. I was doing it then. I would wake up probably around 10:00 or 11:00 and I would go to the local LA Fitness, the gym, and then I would lift weights and I will work on my game. I go into the basketball gym, work on my game and play ball with whoever was there.

At around 3:00 or 4:00, I had to go pick my mom up from work, come back home, eat dinner, watch a bit of TV. At 10:00, I had to go to work again. That was my routine for a few weeks. At this time, mind you, I’m a college graduate. I had a Business Degree from Penn State. I had played overseas already, but here I am living in my parents’ home, borrow my mom’s car to go work overnight at a supermarket. I felt like a damn loser. During that time period, I had to stick to my process and say, “Mr. Agent needs to call me and send me an email. Any opportunity, I would have taken it.” He came with any opportunity and I took it, and we took off from there.

Also, the lesson for the readers is you stayed ready in that time. You still kept working out. When you got the call it’s like, “I’m a little rusty. I haven’t shot a basket in weeks here.” No, we need to be ready when that opportunity comes. For all of the young people, for whatever reason during a pandemic that might have had to move back home with their parents and may feel ashamed, guilty, or it’s stressful. The fact that you have this story could not be timelier. Whether you’re a parent having a child move back in that you didn’t expect, or you’re the child moving back in to realize that our identity is bigger than any one moment in time, in any one thing that’s happening.

I got the call, I was asleep. I took my mom to work, I came home. I’m having my sleep. It was about 10:30 in the morning. My agent gave my number to this traveling team in the United States, like a barnstorming type of team. They called me, woke me up out of my sleep and said, “Dre, we got your number from your agent. We’re about to have a training camp in a couple of weeks. Can you fly to Denver for the training camp to be on this pro team?” It was a training camp. They weren’t even offering me the contract yet. Training camp is I could try out. I said, “Yes, I will be on the next flight.” I couldn’t go back to sleep because I said, “This is exactly what I needed.” I slept maybe three hours at night, but I survived. I made it.

“I will be on the next flight.” That is somebody who is ready at the gate. Ready to go. Not, “Let me think about it. I got to figure it out.” One of your websites is DreAllDay.com. You also told me you have a free gift for everyone. It has to do with your Mirror of Motivation. Tell us a little bit about the gift and how they can get it.

One of my books is called The Mirror of Motivation: The Self-Guide To Self-Discipline. Let me tell you why people want this book. The title tells you motivation, but there’s a whole lot more than that. Everyone who’s read a blog like this probably has some goals. You have some things you want to achieve in life. Most people who have any common sense understand it, you can’t get something for nothing. You have to put some work in to achieve an outcome. Most people got those two parts down. They know what they want or at least have some idea, and they know they got to work to get it.

The Mirror Of Motivation: The Self-Guide to Self-Discipline

The challenge is most people never ask themselves the third question, which is, “Who do I need to be? What type of person do I need to be when I walk into life? What kind of energy do I need to have?” I don’t want people to feel when they come across me and my work, “What does my posture needs to be?” When you’re being is in a certain space, the actions automatically come with that be, and then the results follow the actions. When you get your being in the right place, then you’re doing will start producing results.

A challenge a lot of people have is that they spend a whole lot of their lives working, but they’re not getting any of the results they want despite all their hard work and they’re like, “What’s the problem? What’s wrong with me?” Nothing’s wrong with you. It’s that, you don’t even know who you are because you haven’t mastered the being yet. This book, The Mirror of Motivation, will give you the frameworks for you to answer that question for yourself. This is not Dre hyping you up or me telling you who you need to be because that wouldn’t even make sense. This is you telling yourself where you need to be. That’s why it’s called The Mirror of Motivation. You can get the book for free. All you do is cover a small shipping charge and you can get that book at MirrorOfMotivation.com.

I was visualizing you standing before you took a shot with all the pressure and everyone’s staring, and you practiced that 100 times. You know that who you are is someone who dunks baskets. You have the confidence to be that, as opposed to all the negative self-talk and distractions kicking in. That mirror comes back to you. You’ve already visualized it. You’ve done it. The natural outcome is a success. You can mirror that from what you’ve done in your athletic career into your personal life and then into your business life. Thank you so much for reaching out to me in such a creative way. Thank you for sharing your wonderful insights about life and energy and the willingness to keep going no matter what’s distracting you or happening so that you keep focused on your own progress. We win. Hopefully, the readers will win as well.

Thank you for having me on, John. I enjoyed the conversation. I’m looking forward to hearing from your readers who got value from this.

Thanks, Dre.

Important Links

• The Mirror of Motivation
• Work On Your Game
• TEDx Talk – Dear Dre…How to Be Confident When You’re Not
• DreAllDay.com
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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