Putting it into Practice With Napheesa Collier

Napheesa Collier is a basketball superstar in the WNBA. She sat down with Brett Ledbetter at What Drives Winning and was asked some questions about being a leader, saying, 'No,' and confidence.

Question 1: As a leader, you have to be able to hold the people around you accountable. Everybody leads in a different way, and you have to know the people around you, and their personalities, and try to help them be the best they can be in their own way.

NC: Delivery is really important. You can say something two different ways; one way will help a person, and one way will cause them to shut down for the rest of the game. The way that you talk to people is so important.

I don't mind getting yelled at by my coach, but if you yell at some people, you aren't going to get anything else out of them. And some people need to be yelled at; they don't like to be talked to nicely.

Question 2: A lot of performers are pleasers because they want the fans to like what they are doing. The hardest thing for pleasers to do is to say no, but the higher you go, sometimes being able to say no is one of the most important skills that you can have. What are your thoughts about that?

NC: I've learned that saying no is a perfectly acceptable response. If you aren't comfortable doing something, you need to be able to say no because people will give as much as you let them give, so you have to set boundaries and you have to know what your limits are, and hold steady to those.

Question 3: How do you not allow whether the ball is going in on one side, not to dictate your effort on the other side?

It sucks not scoring, and it is really, really frustrating. But when that happens, it makes me focus harder on defense because if I'm not helping my team on this end, I need to be able to help them on the other end. I can't just be out here being useless and hurting us on both sides of the floor.

Question 4: As you think about your mentality, what is something you wish would have happened sooner for you that would have prevented some of the headaches?

My mentality. Confidence is something that ebbs and flows throughout the season, but believing in myself the whole time fixes so many things. For some professional players, 90% of their game is confidence, and it is so important and can make you a totally different player. It doesn't matter how talented you are; if you aren't confident in yourself, you are not going to be a good player. Confidence changes your entire game.

Brett added these two quotes that I really liked:

I heard a coach say, "If I had to choose between someone being overconfident or delusional, I would take delusional 100 times."

A lot of your likeability is based on other people's self-interest. If they like you or don't like you says more about them than it says about them.