Шай Гилжаус-Александер: Хувийн зан чанарыг өөрчлөх нь амжилтад хүргэх арга зам

This story is part of Peak,The Athletic’sdesk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.

Before he became one of the best basketball players in the world, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was a 13-year-old point guard with a significant problem: He was tiny.

Standing around 5-foot-6, Gilgeous-Alexander possessed the physique of a garden rake — skinny and slight. He would wake before 6 a.m. each day to work on his game at St. Thomas More Catholic Secondary School, but his size presented obvious limitations. So Dwayne Washington, his club coach and a teacher at the school, suggested he pretend to be Allen Iverson, the undersized guard whose fearless style had revolutionized the NBA.

In the annals of youth coaching, it wasn’t exactly a novel idea. What kid hasn’t pretended to be their favorite player — MJ in the finals, Tiger at the Masters, Serena at Wimbledon?

Washington, however, was a science teacher, a self-described nerd with a love of movies and big ideas. He wanted Gilgeous-Alexander to fully commit to the role, to embody the classic traits of Iverson — the feisty attitude, the toughness, the courage to throw his diminutive body into the lane.

The way Washington saw it, Hollywood actors like Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise use the same trick.

“They are tough guys in the movies, but they are playing a role,” he said last yer. “So when you step on the court, that’s like being in front of the camera. You’re not yourself.”

Gilgeous-Alexander obliged. In a small gym outside Toronto, he became Iverson, training with reckless abandon. The role-play helped him eliminate his doubts, create a mindset and overcome his physical limitations. He started playing with no fear.

In time, he would grow to be 6-foot-6, an NBA champion and league MVP, his childhood alter ego just a step on his path to stardom with the Oklahoma City Thunder. But what if Washington had actually stumbled upon something bigger?

What if everyone could benefit from pretending to be someone else?

In the early 2010s, a group of leading U.S. psychologists began a study to test how young children could increase their perseverance and grit.

A group of 6-year-olds was asked to complete a monotonous task on a computer — pressing a key whenever an image of cheese appeared. The researchers told the kids it was an important job; they would be “a good helper” if they worked hard. But they also offered a distraction — an alternative iPad game that the children could choose at any time.

It was an analogue for real life: Tedious work versus mindless screen time. But the researchers added a wrinkle:

• A third of the kids were told to reflect on their effort in the first person. (“Am I working hard?”)
• Another third were told to reflect in the third person, using their own name. (“Is Joey working hard?”)
• And the final third was given the option to be Batman or Dora the Explorer, complete with costumes for each character.

Just as the researchers predicted, the children pretending to be Batman or Dora worked the longest, the superhero mindset seemingly rubbing off. But the results also revealed something fascinating: The further the kids got from their first-person selves, the harder they worked.

The study became known as the “Batman Effect,” a breakthrough in the larger field of psychological distancing, the idea that people can benefit from stepping outside themselves and viewing their lives from a different point of view. It also provided scientific evidence for something athletes have been doing for decades — using an alter ego to help them perform on the field.

It’s a strategy that has been used by everyone from NBA players like Kobe Bryant and Steve Kerr to NFL Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins to baseball star Bobby Witt Jr. to a world championship triathlete who studied method acting in college. More than a mere nickname or persona, the alter ego is a method to calm nerves, increase aggression or heighten focus, a way of transcending your sense of self and improving in the process.

“What you’re talking about with alter egos really gets at this fundamental human capacity that we all possess,” said Ethan Kross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and one of the authors of the Batman Effect. “You are making a decision to adopt not just a different point of view, but a specific kind of alternative point of view that is linked with success.”

In fact, it’s something everyone does — sometimes without realizing it.

Full disclosure: There is nothing new about the use of alter egos.

Nearly two decades ago, I read a book called “The Inner Game of Tennis,” a seminal guide to mental performance by Timothy Gallwey, a former Harvard tennis captain turned coach and author.

Published in 1974, the book became renowned for how it explained the internal voice that disrupts every facet of our lives. Gallwey was creating a framework to understand self-doubt, and he offered a solution he called programming by identity.

It was a fancy way of saying that people should role-play — they should literally take on an alter ego. In one exercise, Gallwey told his players to act as if they were a professional tennis player on a television show, encouraging them to express supreme confidence and adopt the mannerisms of a pro.

“When a player succeeds in forgetting himself and really acts out his assumed role,” Gallwey wrote, “remarkable changes in his game often take place.”

According to Gallwey, it was different from mere positive thinking. He didn’t want his players to tell themselves they were as good as, say, Ken Rosewall, a former No. 1 from the early 70s. He wanted them to be Rosewall, to suppress their own thoughts.

“In the process, you may become more aware of the range of your capabilities,” he wrote.

I remember reading that chapter for two reasons. The first is that it reminded me of high school basketball practice, when I was a junior shooting guard still confined to the varsity scout team. I rarely played in games, but I remembered how much I relished impersonating a star player from an upcoming opponent, unencumbered by my own limitations, never worried about putting up a bad shot.

I was free to play like I was the star. Made jumpers felt euphoric; misses didn’t feel like mine.

The second reason is that it just so happened that a very famous basketball player had experienced something similar. Steve Kerr, a former role player on the Chicago Bulls, told Sports Illustrated that he found so much benefit in pretending to be another player that he started doing it during practice. One day, he decided to be Jeff Hornacek, a former All-Star whose game was craftier and more aggressive than Kerr’s.

“F— Steve Kerr,” he said. “I’m going to be Jeff Hornacek!’”

The choice shifted his mindset and forced him to play differently.

Finally, he was loose.

In the decades since “The Inner Game of Tennis,” Gallwey’s approach — and those like it — began to filter through professional sports. Before his biggest fights, the boxer Ray Leonard would look in the mirror and try to summon “Sugar Ray,” believing his alter ego to be invincible. In more recent times, Seattle Mariners pitcher Logan Gilbert used an alter ego named Walter, a cold-blooded psychopath who showed up on the days he started.

“It’s just a scary name,” Mariners shortstop J.P. Crawford said last year. “No offenses to the Walters out there.”

When Brian Dawkins starred at safety for the Philadelphia Eagles in the early 2000s, he crafted an alter ego inspired by the Marvel character Wolverine, embodying the fearsome traits of a character called “Weapon X.” The character, Dawkins said, acted like a river dam, stemming his anger and channeling it into energy.

Not long after, another star started using his own alter ego. His method foreshadowed another research breakthrough.

Kobe Bryant, the star of the Los Angeles Lakers, was up late one night in the mid-2000s, when he watched the Quentin Tarantino film “Kill Bill: Volume 2.” Like many Tarantino films, “Kill Bill” is a cartoonishly violent revenge tale, and in one scene, a character named Budd suffers a gruesome death via snake bite.

“Budd,” a one-eyed assassin named Elle Driver says, standing over him, “I’d like to introduce my friend: the black mamba.”

Bryant shared the origin story with The Washington Post in 2018, telling reporter Kent Babb that the scene left him rapt.

“I looked it up — yeah, that’s me,” he said. “That’s me!”

For Bryant, the black mamba became a guiding principle, a persona cultivated around a series of traits — cold, relentless, focused. The “mamba mentality” laid the foundation for two of Bryant’s five NBA championships and produced a profound realization: When he got into character before a game, using the theme music from the movie “Halloween,” or playing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to remind him of his high school days, he was no different than Sean Penn, a method actor relying on emotional memory.

At one point, Bryant consulted Larry Moss, an acting coach who has worked with Hilary Swank and Leonardo DiCaprio. The process, Bryant told people, was so similar.

He may have been on to something.

The black mamba alter ego became a guiding principle for Lakers star Kobe Bryant. (Photo by Brian Babineau / NBAE via Getty Images)

When Lesley Paterson, a screenwriter who co-wrote the 2022 Oscar-nominated film “All Quiet on the Western Front,” was a drama student, she learned the Stanislavski method, a technique developed by Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor and one of the most influential theater figures of the early 20th century. Creating a foundation for modern acting, Stanislavski grounded the art in psychology and behavior, using sense memories to elicit emotion. His system transformed acting from imitation to an authentic experience.

As it happened, Paterson was also a world-class triathlete who would win three world titles in off-road triathlon and another half-ironman using a familiar strategy: During races, she would become an alter ego named “Paddy McGinty,” modeled on an old-school Irish brawler who would outlast any opponent.

The character was influenced by the work of her late husband, Simon Marshall, a sports psychologist who worked with F1 teams and professional cyclists. Marshall, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2024, had a radical belief: Just being yourself was often the worst thing you could do.

Paterson used her knowledge of Stanislavski’s work to reverse-engineer her McGinty alter ego. Instead of using personal experience to create emotions, she thought about the traits she lacked but wanted to possess.

“Whether that’s kind of getting up when the chips are down, not caring what people think, even arrogance,” Paterson said. “I started to create behaviors around those character traits.”

She considered the way she walked — shoulders up — the way she talked, and the costumes she wore. To get into character, she avoided eye contact with opponents, clenched a fist and wrote a mantra on her forearm with black marker: “I am free.”

Her husband’s background shed light on the neuroscience: Her thoughts led to feelings, which led to behaviors, which reinforced her thoughts, a core cycle in cognitive behavioral therapy. Together, Paterson and Marshall wrote a book, “The Brave Athlete,” which offered a framework for creating an alter ego.

“Your true self might be shy, self-critical, and easily intimidated by the competition,” they wrote. “But what if for just a few hours you could try on a new athletic identity?”

The proof was in Paterson’s success. But there might have been another reason, too.

As Paterson was racking up world championships in triathlons, researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, were trying to understand how Stanislavski might affect the brain.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine a group of theater majors trained in method acting, they found something intriguing: When the actors were in character, there were deactivations — or reductions — in brain activity in areas associated with self-processing.

In other words, there was a clear loss of the self.

“There’s a certain point where you’ve imagined it so hard, and you put yourself so much in this thing that your body starts to respond as if it’s true,” said Peter Cockett, a theater professor at McMaster and a co-author of the study. “That’s my experience of acting.

“It’s so fundamental to how people operate in the world. And just sometimes it’s like, you fake it until you make it.”

It was a concept that Bryant understood intellectually, and Gilgeous-Alexander understood intuitively.

You change your perspective. Your mind shifts. You get outside yourself and the anxiety slides away.

Who knows what can happen then?