Brain We Are

With 1.9 seconds left in overtime of Game 5 of the 2006 NBA Finals, Dwyane Wade went to the free throw line. Wade & the Heat were down by 1. The series was tied 2-2. He told Tiger Woods how he prepared to make those high-pressure free throws: “The night before,” Wade said, “I was in the gym at midnight. And I was like, ‘I know games come down to free throws. No matter what happens, it's going to come down to free throws.’ So I was in the gym and I had my cousin standing next to me, I had him right in my ear talking shit to me. And so the next night, I get in that same situation where I got to make these free throws. And I just went back to last night in the gym. I just went right back to that. I was like, ‘I just hit 200 of these last night. I got this.’" "That's so good," Tiger says. "It's like," Wade says, "your confidence comes from your work." "Correct," Tiger replies. Wade: "You've done it over and over. You've seen yourself do it." Tiger: "Correct, thousands of times." Wade hit the two free throws, and the Heat won 101-100 to take a 3-2 series lead. Then in Game 6, he had 36 points to help the Heat win the game and their first championship in franchise history. Wade was named NBA Finals MVP. Takeaway 1: Ryan Holiday likes to say, "Belief in yourself is overrated. Generate evidence." Wade simulated the situation so that when he was in that situation for real, he had the evidence. “You've done it over and over,” he told himself. “You've seen yourself do it.” Your confidence comes from your work, from your evidence. Takeaway 2: What Dwayne Wade figured out intuitively—that confidence is a function of the previous work put in—is scientifically accurate. For nearly three decades, the neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett has been studying where emotions—calmness, panic, nervousness, and so on—come from. Her bestselling book, "How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain," gets its title from the discovery that emotions are constructed by the brain. "In every waking moment," she writes, "your brain uses past experience to guide your present sensations." In every waking moment, your brain sifts through its library of past experiences, looking for something similar to what is currently happening. If your brain can’t find anything in your past that is similar to your present, you are in a state of what brain scientists call “experiential blindness.” If you are at the free-throw line with the game on the line, for instance, and you start to panic—you’re in a state of experiential blindness. Your brain, Dr. Barrett would say, is calling you out. You didn't put in the work. You didn't form the past experience needed for your brain to be able to say, as Wade was able to say, "I just hit 200 of these last night. I got this." - - - “You are continually cultivating your past…the experiences you have today become the past that your brain uses to make predictions for tomorrow.” — Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!