On January 26, 2020, I stepped off a plane at JFK after 14 days of back-to-back travel across Europe. I had worked with a global partner, presented research at Aalto University outside Helsinki, and logged thousands of miles across six flights. As I walked through customs and into the main terminal, I looked up at a TV screen and learned that Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others had died in a helicopter crash.
The world had already been holding its breath heading into 2020. That moment made it stop entirely. Within minutes, my son texted me: "Did you see what happened?" It was one of those instants that gets permanently marked in your memory, the way January 28, 1986 is for my generation. The Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff. I graduated high school that year. Some moments carve themselves in.
When the World Stops, Mindset Becomes Everything
The unforeseen tends to make us look at things we wouldn't otherwise examine. That's certainly been true of 2020. COVID-19 didn't appear in anyone's SWOT analysis at the start of the year. The disruption wasn't predictable, the timeline wasn't predictable, and the business impact wasn't predictable. What we can control is how we respond in the fourth quarter of a year that has thrown nearly everything at us.
When the external environment is chaotic, the internal environment matters more than ever. Mindset isn't a soft concept. It's the mechanism through which every decision, every conversation, and every coaching moment gets filtered. And Kobe Bryant, for all his complexity as a person, built one of the most studied and documented performance mindsets in professional sports.
The Kobe Connection
As I followed the coverage after his passing, I was struck by how much of Kobe's influence extended far beyond basketball. His life at 41 was, by any measure, just getting started. He had an Academy Award, a production company, and a body of work on leadership, obsession, and craft that reached people well outside the sports world.
A vivid illustration of that reach happened during the 2020 NBA Finals. After Anthony Davis made a game-winning shot, cameras caught him mouthing "Kobe." Minutes before, coach Frank Vogel had reminded the Lakers they were wearing the Black Mamba uniforms designed in collaboration with Kobe. The team went 3-0 in those uniforms. The name still carried weight. That's the kind of cultural imprint that comes from a genuine philosophy, not just a performance.
If you want to understand the coaching dimension of that philosophy, I'd point you to our conversation with Todd Herman, author of The Alter Ego Effect and a former business coach to Kobe. Todd's framework for activating an alter ego overlaps directly with what Kobe described in his own words as "switching my mind to something somewhere else."
Ten Principles of a Winner's Mindset
In an interview titled "The Mindset of a Winner," Kobe laid out the principles that shaped how he competed. They translate directly to how leaders show up in high-stakes moments, whether that's a Q4 pipeline review, a difficult employee conversation, or a board presentation.
- Desire to win — "You want first place, come play with me. You want second place, go somewhere else." Clarity of expectation starts at the top.
- Watch the best — Study the people who are performing at the highest level in your field, whatever that field is.
- Talk to the best — Access and proximity matter. Seek out conversations that raise your ceiling.
- Do everything it takes to be better — The world becomes your library. Every conversation, every setback, every win is material.
- Understand your strengths and weaknesses — Self-awareness is the prerequisite for intentional development, as a leader and as a coach.
- Switch your mind to something somewhere else — This is the Alter Ego Effect in practice. Activate the version of yourself that performs at the level the moment demands.
- Get over yourself — You must practice. Ego is the enemy of growth.
- Tailor your training — One size doesn't fit all. The best leaders coach to the individual, not to the role.
- Commit to your passion as a choice — Passion gets you started. Commitment keeps you going when the fourth quarter gets difficult.
- Always desire to do more — Complacency is the ceiling. The best performers are perpetually dissatisfied with where they are.
What Kobe's Business Mindset Reveals About Leadership
Near the end of that interview, Kobe was asked about running his production studio. His answer was a masterclass in what we'd call NeuroCoaching principles: understand the business deeply before you try to lead it, identify the barriers to entry honestly, be obsessive about the craft, build other leaders around you who you genuinely believe in, and create a culture where that obsessiveness is shared.
That last point carries particular weight heading into Q4. Culture is either an accelerant or a drag when pressure is high. Leaders who have built psychological safety, clear expectations, and genuine coaching relationships will find that their teams respond differently to a difficult quarter than teams that have been managed from a distance.
The question isn't whether Q4 will be hard. In 2020, it almost certainly will be. The question is what you've built that lets your people show up to hard things with something to draw from.
The Alter Ego in Practice
What Todd Herman calls the Alter Ego Effect is, at its core, a neuroscience-backed technique for accessing your peak performance identity under pressure. Kobe called it "putting yourself in the cage." The idea is that under high-stakes conditions, people default to familiar patterns, including fear-based ones. An intentionally constructed alter ego gives the brain a different default to reach for.
For leaders, this shows up in how you enter difficult conversations. What do you think about when you're walking into a Q4 review with a team that is behind plan? What narrative is running in the background? Leaders who have done the internal work to identify their performance identity, and who practice activating it, consistently show up differently than those who are reacting to the moment.
Finish the Race Strong
2020 has been a year unlike any most of us have experienced. The disruption has been real, the losses have been real, and the fatigue is real. None of that changes what the fourth quarter asks of you as a leader.
Challenge yourself to assess where your mindset is heading into Q4. Identify what your Black Mamba is, the alter ego you can activate when the moment demands your best. Study the principles above not as sports trivia but as a serious framework for how peak performers have always approached high-pressure periods.
Worth a conversation about what this looks like for your leadership team? Reach out to Braintrust and let's talk.
