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Diana Taurasi
Alex Auerbach
April 11, 2024
Reading Time: 5 Minutes
What to Expect:
An inside look at Diana’s pre-game routine
How to develop a “you vs. you” mentality
Diana Taurasi is one of the most decorated athletes in the history of basketball:
3 National Championships
2 NCAA Titles
2 Olympic Golds
1 World Champsionship
4 Euroleague titles
And her combination of "skills, vision, and competitive drive" have drawn comparisons to some of the best hoopers of all time - Jordan, Bird, and Magic.
The theme of those 3 traits elevating Taurasi's game show up again and again. Her competitive drive is compared to Jordan on The Last Dance. Teammates and opponents, as well as Taurasi herself, credit her competitive edge and mindset for driving her status as the best to ever do it in the women's game.
This combination of traits - the intense will to win, competitive spirit, and IQ - is one of the foundational recipes for excellent performance in sports (and in any domain, really). These three traits can make up for average physical abilities, because the gap is filled with effort and creativity in ways that more physically gifted (but less intense and less "basketball IQ"-driven) have difficulty compensating for in competition.
Here's a look at what makes Taurasi's mindset so special.
You have to believe in yourself when no one else does. That makes you a winner right there.
Fear of "Not Being Good"
“I go to sleep every single night thinking I’m not good enough. I really do. I don’t know if that’s healthy or not. But I really do have a fear of not being good, and I don’t like that.”
While I can't definitively say this is healthy or unhealthy (though she did have a bit of a tough streak off the court), it's noteworthy in one major way. Most elite performers I know and have worked with are as motivated (or more) by being great as they are afraid of being average.
Those sleepless nights probably hurt her performance at times, but this mindset likely drove more intense work and a deeper competitive spirit than most people on the floor. Diana was constantly trying to prove herself, which meant there was a constant need to get better. While there might be more positive or sustainable ways to tap into this mentality, it's a competitive advantage that pushed her in one significant way.
This quote encapsulates what might be the most powerful development tool for any high performer, disguised as fear:
This mindset forced her to compete with herself.
Compete with yourself
Looked at a bit more adaptively, you could read this quote and intuit that not being good enough is about not being good enough for herself.
It's hard to imagine this belief was a value judgment on who she was as a person. Rather, it was a judgment on how much further she had to go as a performer. She was so driven to be good that she was clear on how much left she had to do, instead of resting on her laurels of what she had accomplished.
What this (likely) led to was an intense focus on the process. The process of getting better. Improving her shot, improving her defense, always pushing herself, and competing with herself each day. It's hard to imagine Diana settling for a day of practice that was worse than yesterday. This intense focus on the process underpins self-regulated learning and allows her to maintain forward progress.
One of the best things parents and coaches can cultivate in sports is a desire to compete with yourself. The attitude that it's "you vs you" will push you to the edge of your abilities.
That involves just talking about improvement regularly, focusing on effort, progress, and reaching goals before pushing further. If you can instill a mindset that the best way to become great is to simply be better than you were yesterday, you've got the foundation of a you vs. you mentality.
Will to win
If you don’t play with that edge or that competitive spirit, you’re just another player out there. I can only speak for myself, but when I don’t play with that fight, then I’m just ordinary."
People only talk about you being great if you win. Winning is what drives, to a degree, every high performer I can think of.
Here is Diana's fear of being average again, in the context of competing. Not competing makes you average. And for Diana, nothing seems worse than being average.
That fear manifests in an intense competitive spirit and will to win.
Losing is misery.
She was willing to do nearly anything, within the rules of the game, to win. This is similar to all-time greats across sports, including Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, Michael Phelps, and others. Winning trumps just about everything.
Kelli Anderson, author who profiled Taurasi's career, compared Taurasi several times to Jordan, both in terms of her competitive drive and her will to win. In Anderson's view, this intense competitiveness, coupled with her "incredible basketball smarts," allowed her to become one of the GOATs.
Be a Kindhearted A**hole
She's all the things you do not want to compete against. But she's also all the things you want in a teammate."
By reporters, teammates, and coaches alike, Taurasi is repeatedly described as a unique (and valuable) combination of confidence, competitiveness, and being lovable as a teammate.
She managed to balance her intense competitiveness and will to win with not being a total jerk, with some pretty incredible career results. Coach Brian Angler described this as a combination of "insincts", being an "unselfish player" and "one of the best passers." Teammates describe it as "confidence, intense, ferocious."
Taurasi describes herself as a "kind-hearted a**hole" when it comes to getting everyone involved in the game and on the floor. She believed that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, that she'd go farther with an involved and engaged team than by showing her individual ability time and again.
I play basketball because I love it. Being on the court, being able to accomplish something with other people.
I had the chance to see what this looks like up close and personal with the G(Raptor)OAT of all time, Kyle Lowry. In a moment I'll never forget, Kyle passed up an open 3 twice in one possession, in favor of getting a younger player a better look. As it happened, Kyle made the deliberate choice to pass the ball back to the young player, after that young player had deferred to him, to get the young player involved.
These kinds of acts from leaders build trust and help to get everyone more involved. As great as Taurasi was, having her whole team on her side made her an even more unstoppable force. We're all better when our team is better.
An Inside Look: Taurasi's Pre-Game Preparation
In this video, we get a really cool look into how an elite performer views preparing for their games and the mentality they should adopt.
You'll hear her say that, 30 minutes before the game, she's focused on "being calm and in thinking mode." This is typical in my experience with professional athletes. Though the locker room is often full of energy and movement, the best players are trying to still their mind, process the game, think through their game plan and how they want to play. The less focused, less intense competitors are doing things like joking around, making light of the upcoming competition, or trying to distract themselves from the performance they're about to have to manage the pressure.
The next glimpse we get is at the 12 minute mark - Taurasi goes into being more intense and "ferocious."
This is about the time when she's going to be on the court for the rest of the night, so it makes sense to raise her energy and intensity as the competition gets nearer. This raising of her physiology can help her focus and use energy more efficiently as the game gets going.
You then hear her talk about going into "relax mode" right before tip off.
Her self-talk is calm and focused: "all the hard work is done, there's nothing to be nervous about, it's time to show off."
When I make a shot, I instantly forget it. Taking the clutch shot is like any other shot - if you put too much pressure on yourself, you're probably going to miss it, so just take it with confidence. If you make it, great, if you miss it, hopefully you get another one.
This is what it sounds like to trust your preparation and training. To know you've worked as hard as you possibly can to be ready for each game, so that when the lights come on, you can be fully dialed in.
Her approach also matches my own experience working with high-level pros. After they've found the right balance of energy before the game, they start coaching themselves into a quiet confidence, a focus that they can sustain throughout the game, and a trust of the process they need to deal with the ebbs and flows of what's about to unfold.
She also gives us an inside look into the mind of a competitor while performing.
She says that while she's on the court, she "plays off instincts", the things she's prepared for and what she needs to do based on the game plan. She stays present with the performance and then turns her attention to the next possession each time.
Fearless on the Floor
When you get someone who's talented in that [fearless] mindset and works on her game as much as she's worked on her game over the years, that's what happens."
This quote is in reference to Taurasi becoming (arguably) the best scorer of all-time in the WNBA. Taurasi wasn't afraid of making mistakes, wasn't afraid of missing, wasn't afraid of practicing difficult shots. That approach, coupled with a willingness to push herself, take contact, and not back down from a challenge led to her getting the "green light" to do her thing in nearly every game she played.
I believe that this level of fearlessness comes from a deep confidence built from knowing that you put in the work. If you train hard, consistently, then when you step into the lights to compete, there really isn't anything to be afraid of. As Taurasi mentions when describing her game preparation, she thinks of it as "time to show off," whereas more average performers see it as a time when they're being evaluated, judged, or worse.
Give Everything
"You give everything that you have," Taurasi said. "People just think it's when you walk into the gym and then you leave. [Jordan is] the type of person that carried it with him everywhere. I mean, everywhere he went you felt that competitive spirit... those things, to me, resonate."
"When I'm in a season, I give everything I have," she added. "It consumes my whole life."
Taurasi is recognized as one of the best shooters in the history of the game, men's or women's. A big part of that comes from how she practices and the work she puts in. Her abiltiy to give everything helped her rise to the top.
It's also what she respected the most about Jordan.
"Watching this, he gave up his life to be the best basketball player in the world. That's what you have to do. In any profession, if you want to be the best, you have to give up your life. And it's not easy."
When she was asked about her secret to becoming an elite scorer, she had one answer:
Work.
"You've got to show up every day and you have to be willing to sacrifice a lot of things," she said. "That's what you have to do. If you really want to do something different than everyone else then you have to do things that are different."
This is one of the more sinister sides of excellence in anything. While I believe you can have a degree of integration with work and life, if you truly want to be one of the best to ever do it in your field, it's going to take some form of sacrifice.
For athletes, that sacrifice is often time away from family and friends. Missing major life events. Skipping otherwise developmentally appropriate activities, like going out.
For non-athletes, that means making difficult social choices, thinking intentionally about where you spend your time, and committing yourself to your craft in ways that most other people might struggle to relate to.
For Taurasi, this didn't seem to matter. To be considered one of the best of all time, to win repeatedly, was more rewarding than anything else could've been.
"I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world," Taurasi said. "There's a lot of things I didn't get to do, like my senior prom. Oh well."
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