Alan Stein Jr.
Senior leaders set the performance standard for everyone underneath them, and most of them set it badly. Composure under pressure, daily preparation, and the small habits that compound into team output get treated as personal traits rather than trainable behaviours. Organisations end up with strategy decks no one can execute because the people executing have never been coached on the fundamentals of how to perform.
Alan Stein Jr. is a performance coach and author who teaches senior leaders the daily habits, preparation routines, and pressure responses that elite basketball players use to perform at the top of their field.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Alan Stein Jr.
- Direct working access to Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, and Kobe Bryant during their formative years gives him firsthand observation of how the highest performers in modern basketball actually prepare, not the version told in interviews.
- Three published books (Raise Your Game, Sustain Your Game, Next Play) form a connected curriculum on individual performance, sustained output without burnout, and focus discipline. Leaders can extend a keynote into a longer programme.
- Translates athletic preparation into language a corporate audience already uses. Sales teams, retail operators, and frontline managers leave with habits they can run on Monday morning.
- Repeat client list crosses retail, financial services, healthcare, and franchise operations: American Express, Pepsi, Under Armour, Starbucks, Charles Schwab, Orangetheory Fitness. The material travels across sectors.
Biography highlights
- Performance coach at the LeBron James Skills Academy and the Jordan Brand Classic
- Trained Stephen Curry in the month before the 2009 NBA Draft
- Author of Raise Your Game (Hachette), Sustain Your Game (Hachette Book Group), and Next Play (Amplify Publishing, 2025)
- Foreword to Raise Your Game by ESPN analyst Jay Bilas, who also features on the Next Play audiobook
- Corporate clients include American Express, Pepsi, Under Armour, Starbucks, Charles Schwab, Orangetheory Fitness
- Host of the Raise Your Game podcast
Biography
The best basketball players in the world are not the most physically gifted people in the room. They are the most prepared. Alan Stein Jr. spent fifteen years inside that preparation as a basketball performance coach, training Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, and Kobe Bryant during the years their habits were being formed.
That access is the substance of his work. As a coach at the LeBron James Skills Academy, the Jordan Brand Classic, and Mike Jones’s DeMatha programme, Stein watched how elite players approached the unseen hours: warm-ups, recovery, film, the same drills repeated for years. The behaviours were unglamorous and learnable. He now teaches them to senior leaders and their teams.
His three books map a single argument across individual, sustained, and focused performance. Raise Your Game (Hachette), with a foreword by ESPN’s Jay Bilas, sets out the habits. Sustain Your Game (Hachette Book Group) addresses stress, stagnation, and burnout. Next Play (Amplify Publishing, 2025) takes Coach K’s two-word philosophy and turns it into a discipline for what to do after a mistake or a win.
Corporate clients use the material because it crosses sectors without losing specificity. American Express, Pepsi, Under Armour, Starbucks, Charles Schwab, and Orangetheory Fitness have all booked him. The vocabulary is athletic, but the application is operational: how a sales team prepares for a quarter, how a frontline manager recovers from a bad week, how a leader sets a daily standard the team can see.
Key speaking topics
- Peak performance habits for senior leaders
- Self-leadership and preparation under pressure
- Team cohesion and high-performance culture
- Stress, burnout, and sustained output
- Sales performance mindset
- Lessons from elite athletes for corporate leaders
Ideal for
- Sales leaders and chief revenue officers running performance offsites
- CHROs and L&D leads building leadership development programmes
- Franchise and retail operations leaders running annual conferences
- Senior leadership teams resetting standards after a difficult quarter or year
Audience outcomes
- A clear set of preparation habits modelled on how elite athletes actually train
- Specific routines for managing stress and sustaining performance over a full year, not a quarter
- A shared vocabulary for accountability and standard-setting that a leadership team can use the next day
- Concrete examples from named NBA players that make the principles memorable for frontline staff
- A reframe of “talent” as habit and preparation, useful for managers building younger teams
Talks
A keynote on the individual habits, mindset, and preparation routines that separate elite performers from the rest.
Key takeaways:
- The five fundamentals of individual performance: self-awareness, passion, discipline, coachability, confidence
- How elite athletes use the unseen hours of preparation
- Practical routines audience members can install the same week
A leadership keynote on what senior leaders do to lift the performance of the people around them.
Key takeaways:
- The role of vision, culture, and character in setting team standards
- Servant leadership as a daily behaviour, not a slogan
- How to coach for accountability without breaking trust
An organisational keynote on team cohesion and collective performance.
Key takeaways:
- Belief, role clarity, and communication as the operating fabric of a high-performing team
- How unselfishness compounds across a company
- Common patterns that quietly erode team output
A keynote tailored to sales organisations on the mindsets and habits of consistent top performers.
Key takeaways:
- The daily disciplines of consistently high-performing salespeople
- How to maintain output across a long quota cycle
- Mental routines for managing rejection and pipeline volatility
A keynote on managing stress, avoiding stagnation, and beating burnout over a long career.
Key takeaways:
- The PERFORM framework for managing stress
- The PIVOT framework for breaking out of stagnation
- The PREVAIL framework for recovering from burnout
A keynote built on a two-word philosophy for resetting focus after a mistake, a win, or a setback.
Key takeaways:
- How elite athletes mentally reset between plays
- The cost of carrying the last mistake into the next decision
- A simple daily practice for present-moment focus