{"id":1967786,"date":"2026-06-02T10:00:57","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T07:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1967786"},"modified":"2026-06-02T10:00:57","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T07:00:57","slug":"what-it-means-to-have-a-jalen-brunson-mindset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1967786","title":{"rendered":"What it means to have a Jalen Brunson mindset"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This story is part of Peak,\u00a0The Athletic\u2019s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak\u2019s newsletter\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In four seasons with the New York Knicks, Jalen Brunson has averaged 26.9 points per game, earned second-team All-NBA honors three times and led the team back to the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the resume of a budding New York legend. Just don\u2019t call Brunson a star.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not a star,\u201d he said last month.<\/p>\n

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The context is worth unpacking: In the days before the Eastern Conference finals, a reporter asked Brunson about relinquishing control of the Knicks\u2019 offense during a four-game sweep of the Philadelphia 76ers. Brunson was spending additional time off the ball.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome stars might push back,\u201d the reporter posited.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne, I\u2019m not a star,\u201d Brunson answered. \u201cTwo, I want to win.\u201d<\/p>\n

Forgive us for fixating on labels for a moment, but the assertion was clearly absurd. Brunson is one of the best guards in the NBA. Yet the fact that he delivered the answer so plainly and directly seemed to reveal something deeper, a window in the Brunson mindset, a powerful tool for maximizing performance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best athletes, executives and coaches I\u2019ve ever worked with are master storytellers,\u201d said Justin S\u2019ua, an executive performance coach who has worked with players and coaches across professional sports. \u201cThey have learned how to purposely engineer their self-talk in order to get them to the feeling \u2014 the ideal state \u2014 that they need to be the best versions of themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the relationship between narrative and success is not just anecdotal. There\u2019s research that suggests we can all benefit from acting like Brunson.<\/p>\n

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For Brunson, the story involves an identity forged on the night of the NBA Draft in 2018. After winning two NCAA Championships and being selected the Associated Press national player of the year at Villanova, his size and athletic profile kept him on the board until the second round, where he was drafted by the Dallas Mavericks.<\/p>\n

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The experience was disheartening. Brunson believed he had done everything he could to prove himself to NBA teams. It also provided an opening, a label to dwell on and a narrative to create.<\/p>\n

\u201cI used that second-round name,\u201d Brunson later said.<\/p>\n

It was a familiar strategy used by people in many walks of life. Brunson didn\u2019t just imagine a chip on his shoulder. He engineered a process-oriented mental state, an intentional mindset to which he clung during his first years in the league, as he grew from a backup guard to a free agent worth $104 million in 2022. He could never be a star; he was a second-round pick.<\/p>\n

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The identity dovetailed with research on the power of the underdog, which just happened to be published during Brunson\u2019s first years in the league. In 2020, Samir Nurmohamed, now an assistant professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania, published a paper that showed evidence that perceiving yourself as an underdog can lead to higher motivation and better performance at work. Then one year later, Nurmohamed and two colleagues took it a step further.<\/p>\n

Years of prior research had shown that discrimination and prejudice in the workplace hindered the performance of employees, a self-fulfilling prophecy that caused the targets of the discrimination to perform in line with the underlying assumptions.<\/p>\n

In this case, the discrimination was more serious than an NBA team judging a guard\u2019s height and athleticism. But the relationship was similar. <\/span><\/p>\n

So the researchers set out to examine how self-narratives could counteract prior experiences of prejudice. In one study<\/a>, they recruited more than 300 unemployed job seekers from a reemployment center in the northeast. Then each participant was randomly assigned to create one of three self-narratives:<\/p>\n