George Mumford - Mindfulness Coach to Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant | The Tim Ferriss Show

Tim Ferriss interviews George Mumford, the mindfulness coach who helped Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls win championships and later worked with Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal. George traces his arc from college basketball player and roommate of Julius Erving, through a hidden heroin addiction while holding a security-clearance corporate job, to getting clean in 1984 via a 12-step program and a mind-body stress reduction program. He explains how he entered elite sports through Phil Jackson and John Kabat-Zinn, and how he meets people where they are rather than forcing rigid practice. The conversation covers core teachings including the 'four A's' (awareness, acceptance, action, assessment), the 'dizziness of freedom,' barrier breakthroughs versus the improvement trap, and stories from prisons and the NBA. George closes on the idea that everyone has a masterpiece within and that change is an inner game of personal responsibility.

• George says his first encounter with Michael Jordan was not on the court but in the locker room after Jordan had retired, where he could feel Jordan's intense yet calm energy 'even before I even got to meet him.'
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• George denies the widely-reported claim that he thought Jordan looked manic or bipolar; instead he says Jordan practiced 'like a person trying to make the team' because he never wanted to get cut again after being cut in 10th grade.
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• George confirms the Boston Globe quote that he had 'a security clearance on my badge and track marks on my forearm' while working at GTE Sylvania as a functional heroin addict, wearing long sleeves year-round.
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• George describes hitting bottom in March 1984 with a strep infection and 104-degree fever, then attending his first AA meeting on April Fool's Day, April 1st.
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• George explains he entered elite sports when Phil Jackson and John Kabat-Zinn met at the Omega Institute; he joined the Bulls at 1993 training camp just as Jordan's father was murdered and Jordan retired.
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• George reveals he told Kobe Bryant 'the best way to score is not to try to score,' and Kobe later told him he remembered everything George had taught him.
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• George recounts that Jordan described his game-winning Georgetown NCAA shot as the moment he went 'from Mike Jordan to Michael Jordan,' framing it as a paradigm shift in self-image.
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• George lays out his 'four A's' framework for performance and meditation: awareness, acceptance (the hardest part), compassionate action, and assessment.
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• George Mumford roomed with future Hall of Famer Julius Erving (Dr. J) at the University of Massachusetts.
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• George got clean in 1984 and at the time of recording is 36 years and 6 months clean and sober.
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• George's mind-body recovery began in an experimental stress management program at Beth Israel run by Dr. Joan Borysenko, then one of only three psychoneuroimmunologists in the world.
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• George says he has averaged over a book a week for his 36-plus years of sobriety, starting with a 20-to-25-book syllabus he read entirely.
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• George lived at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center for six years and worked five years at the Center for Mindfulness running a prison project and inner-city project.
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• George attributes the concept of the 'dizziness of freedom' to Søren Kierkegaard (1846), framing freedom and anxiety as two sides of the same coin.
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• George cites the military term VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) to describe embracing life's uncertainty.
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• George worked with Boston College point guard Troy Bell, who won Big East Player of the Year and holds the BC record for most points scored.
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• George recounts a Boston College team improving from 11-19 to 27-5, and an AAU-style summer squad going 17-0 winning by an average of 22.5 points after declaring a shared vision.
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• George tells of teaching a meditation class at Norfolk County House of Correction, the prison where Malcolm X served time, and discovering 28 of 32 students spoke only Spanish, forcing him to abandon his notes.
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