Earned. Not given. Starts before tip-off. Warm up the right way ➜ The Ignition
Stop Trying to Think Positive: Positive thinking sounds good. But it breaks down exactly when you need it most — in the middle of the worst moment of the game. There's a better way.
January 1, 2018. Rose Bowl. Georgia versus Oklahoma.
Baker Mayfield is destroying Georgia's defense. Oklahoma averages nine yards per play against a unit that had been elite all season. Georgia walks into halftime down 31–17. The locker room is heavy. These are the same players who just gave up 31 points in 30 minutes. They know it. Everyone in the building knows it.
Here's the question I want you to sit with: what do you tell yourself in that moment?
Because "stay positive" isn't going to cut it. You can't manufacture positive feelings about a half where you just got taken apart. Your brain knows the truth. Trying to paper over it with optimism feels dishonest — and it is dishonest. Georgia's players didn't need a motivational speech. They needed something real.
They came out of halftime and nearly won the game.
What they were running on wasn't positive thinking. It was something Trevor Moawad — one of the most respected mental conditioning coaches in the world — calls neutral thinking. And once you understand what it actually is, you'll never look at the mental side of basketball the same way again.
The Problem with Positive Thinking
I want to be clear: I'm not saying confidence is bad. Confidence is everything. But there's a difference between genuine confidence — built through preparation, repetition, and self-knowledge — and manufactured positivity that asks you to feel good about a situation that isn't good.
The problem with positive thinking is that it breaks at the exact moment you need it most.
You miss three shots in a row. You turn it over twice in the fourth quarter. Your team is down ten with six minutes left. You've been trained your whole life to "stay positive." But your brain is sitting there going — we're not positive right now. We're down ten. We just had a terrible third quarter. You can't out-think the truth.
Moawad figured this out over decades of working with elite performers. He's been in eight college football national championship games as a mental conditioning coach. He worked alongside Nick Saban at Alabama. He's the man in Russell Wilson's ear. And the tool he kept coming back to — the one that held up when nothing else did — wasn't positive thinking.
It was neutral thinking.
What Neutral Thinking Actually Is
Here's Moawad's definition: neutral thinking is judgment-free thinking, especially in crises and pressure situations. It doesn't ask you to feel good. It doesn't ask you to feel bad. It asks you to strip away the emotional noise, see the situation for exactly what it is, and choose your next behavior.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
Neutral thinking doesn't care about the last play. It cares about the next one.
The most powerful example in Moawad's book is Russell Wilson in the 2015 NFC Championship. Wilson throws four interceptions against Green Bay. Four. His team is down 19–7 in the fourth quarter. And he comes back to win in overtime, then goes and wins the Super Bowl two weeks later.
How? Because of something Moawad had drilled into him: each play has a history and a life of its own — but it has nothing to do with what happens next. Wilson treated his fourth interception the same way he'd treat his first play from scrimmage. A fresh decision. A fresh opportunity. The interception was real. It happened. And it had absolutely nothing to do with the next snap.
That is neutral thinking doing its job.
What This Looks Like on a Basketball Court
Let's bring it home, because this is where I want you to actually feel it.
You're a sophomore guard. First varsity start. You come out aggressive, drive the lane early, and get your shot rejected into the third row. You jog back on defense and your brain is already in a trial — that was embarrassing, everyone saw it, I'm not ready for this level, I should've stayed in my lane.
That's what your brain does. It catastrophizes. It turns one blocked shot into a verdict about who you are.
Positive thinking says: shake it off, you're great, you've got this. But you don't fully believe that right now. So it rings hollow.
Neutral thinking says something different. It says: that play happened. It's over. What does the next possession require of me?
No verdict. No spiral. No manufactured emotion you can't access right now. Just the truth — that play is done — and a behavior — the next play is starting.
This is why the girls I work with who've started practicing this are different to coach. Not because they don't feel the pressure. They feel all of it. But they've stopped letting one bad moment write the story of the whole game.
The Spoken Word Problem
Here's one of the most practical findings Moawad shares, and it's one I think about constantly as a coach.
Negative words spoken out loud carry more cognitive weight than negative words you merely think. Saying something bad about your situation out loud — "I can't guard her," "we're not winning this game," "I always miss these" — literally changes how your brain processes the situation. It's not just attitude. It's neuroscience.
This has real implications in a huddle. In a timeout. In what you say to yourself at the free throw line when the gym is loud and the game is on the line.
Neutral thinking creates verbal discipline. Not fake positivity — "I'm definitely making this, everything is great." Neutral: "I've made thousands of free throws. I know what to do. Here we go." You're not lying to yourself. You're going to the truth and choosing your next behavior from there.
The Line in the Dirt
The most extreme version of this in the book isn't from sports. It's from Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, whose story was told in Lone Survivor. He's shot eleven times in the mountains of Afghanistan. His teammates are killed. His back and pelvis are broken. He has to travel seven miles to the nearest village or he dies.
Seven miles, shot eleven times, alone.
He doesn't think about seven miles. That thought would have killed him — his brain would have classified it as impossible and shut down. Instead, he picks up a rock, draws a line in the dirt, and crawls to it. Then draws another line. Crawls to that.
He does that for seven miles.
He didn't think positively. He didn't think negatively. He thought: I am capable of crawling to this line.
That's neutral. That's next behavior. That's the whole philosophy — stripped all the way down to bone.
How to Start Using This Now
You don't need to read the book to start practicing this tonight. Here's where to begin:
Catch the verdict habit. Start noticing when you let one play turn into a verdict about your ability. One turnover becomes I'm not a point guard. One missed shot becomes my shot is broken. That's your brain catastrophizing. Neutral thinking interrupts that pattern at the source.
Ask the next-behavior question. After any mistake — in a game, in practice, in the film room — ask yourself: what does the next possession require of me? Not why did I do that, not what does this mean about me. Just: what's next, and what does it need?
Watch your mouth. Start paying attention to what you say out loud after a mistake — to teammates, to yourself, to anyone. The spoken word matters more than the thought. Discipline your language and you start to discipline your mindset.
Separate the event from the verdict. The turnover happened. That's true. What isn't true is that it predicts what comes next. Those are two different things. Most players collapse because they let the event become the verdict. Neutral thinking keeps them separated.
Why This Matters for the Girls' Game Specifically
I work primarily with teenage female athletes, and I want to name something directly: the mental spiral after a mistake tends to run deeper in female athletes than in male athletes. The research is consistent on this. Girls are more likely to internalize a mistake as a statement about their identity — I'm not good enough — rather than processing it as information about a single play.
That's not a weakness. It's a pattern — and patterns can be changed.
Neutral thinking is one of the most powerful tools I've found for this specific challenge. Because it doesn't ask you to feel differently about the mistake. It doesn't gaslight you with forced positivity. It just says: that happened, it's real, it's over, what's next? There's a freedom in that. An honesty. And for a player who tends to carry mistakes, that kind of permission — to leave it in the past where it belongs — is genuinely liberating.
The Last Thing
Trevor Moawad built his whole career on one insight: that the mental side of performance doesn't have to be inspirational to be effective. It has to be honest. It has to be functional. It has to work when you're down 31–17 at halftime and everything is heavy and nothing feels good.
Neutral thinking works then. That's the whole point.
Georgia came out of that halftime and nearly won the game. Wilson came back from four interceptions and won the Super Bowl. Luttrell crawled seven miles, one line in the dirt at a time.
Not because they thought positively. Because they stopped arguing with reality, asked what was true right now, and chose their next behavior.
That's available to every player. Including you. Starting with the next possession.
Want to go deeper on the mental side of your game? This is what AO Hoops is built for. Follow along — there's more coming.
