“As much as we pump iron and we run to build our strength up, we need to build our mental strength up… so we can focus… so we can be in concert with one another.” Phil Jackson

Legendary professional basketball Coach Phil Jackson knows the ways of sports psychology for basketball and what it takes to win – consistently and on a championship level – on basketball’s biggest stage.

On top of being an accomplished professional basketball player that was a player on two championship-winning teams in the 1970’s, Jackson also led a Hall of Fame head coaching career that garnered the teams he coached 11 championship titles.

A pioneer of the mental game of basketball’s importance, Jackson calmly mentored and helmed teams with era-defining superstar players such as Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol.

His unorthodox coaching style of personnel management and Eastern philosophy earned him the nickname ‘Zen Master’ and his approach to the cerebral part of the game initiated a new era of basketball mental toughness.

His coaching methods revolved around consistent player management, team-oriented cultures, and customized basketball mental toughness reinforcement.

Muscles and brawn may build the body but a successful mental game of basketball is complete with a calm, confident, collected, and consistent basketball mental toughness: Winning in the modern basketball era is seldom achievable without some of the measures of mental game coaching that Phil Jackson brought to light over his head coaching career.

He fostered the notion of letting individuals forge their own destiny, of coaching from the inside out and heartfelt bonding with his players on a human level, not merely an authoritative level that can be deemed too harsh or inflexible; he built unflinching basketball mental toughness for his players by allocating meditation time for his players in order for them to fine-tune their unique approach to the sport; he even created breathing techniques for his teams to practice collectively in order to cultivate a strong sense of oneness between both player and coach.

Such practices and techniques were virtually unheard of prior to Phil Jackson’s coaching tenure in professional basketball.

By maximizing each individual’s personal strengths, engaging their individual abilities, how they contribute those same abilities to the team, and by forging a strong, almost unbreakable bond between players and coach Jackson ushered in a new era of sports psychology for basketball.

His techniques urged players to make even simple, rote basketball tasks such as dribbling and shooting free throws ‘sacred’ by simplifying thought, and in turn the very game that these players have built their entire careers around.

The mental game of basketball was broken down to its base components for players under his tutelage, and individual maximization of talent and potential became fused with a steel-strong team culture that naturally created a winning mentality and an unheard of competitive advantage that continues to be replicated to the present day.

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