Jay Williams has reached what he calls an “inflection point.”
“If I can’t be the best version of myself, then I can’t be that for the people that I love,” Williams said. “I think that’s what I’m processing now.”
Williams wears many hats these days: ESPN college basketball analyst, a regular contributor to the network’s shows like “Get Up” and “College GameDay,” co-founder of a media company, dad to a son and two daughters and a husband to his wife, Nikki. Taking on all these different roles has led to a recent self-discovery journey for Williams.
“From a self developmental point of view,” he said, “I’m leaning into a lot right now.”
Williams played for coach Mike Krzyzewski at Duke for three years, where he won a national championship and was named the consensus National Player of the Year in 2002. The Chicago Bulls selected him with the second pick in the draft that year, with the hope that Williams would become a franchise-changing guard. But in 2003, a motorcycle crash left him with severe injuries. He was 21 years old. After the crash caused his pro career to end early, Williams did what he knew best: Put his head down and barreled through, settling on a new path in broadcasting and attacking it with the same intensity and competitiveness he had as a player.
But recently Williams has started to take a step back and reflect on each area of his life, putting much thought into what the most successful way to juggle it all could look like.
“I got out of my accident because work became basketball,” he said. “That’s how I attacked it. That’s not to say I’ve lost any of my passion or ambition for my work because I haven’t. That’s a huge part of who I am, but learning how to channel that same intentionality or try to learn how to better channel that intentionality to my kids, to my family, and to myself, that’s the inflection point.”
Just as Williams’ understandings about himself have evolved with time, the lessons he’s taken away from his experiences have, too. Here are five tools he’s been leaning on:
Learn to love the process
Somewhere on the sidelines of a college game 20 years ago, you might’ve found Williams doing tongue exercises to improve his speech and diction.
“I can show you what they were,” he said, placing his index finger and middle finger in his mouth. “You do an aaaaghhhh.”
Following the motorcycle accident, Williams worked as an analyst for CBS Sports Network before joining ESPN. When he was starting out, he spoke with a lisp and tended to rush through his sentences, so ESPN paired him with a voice coach to work on enunciation.
But as he was carrying his own camera equipment into games and working on his speech, Williams questioned this kind of work compared to the playing career he had envisioned.
“That was hard for me,” he said. “It was hard for me not to be jealous. Not to be envious. And I missed it.”
As a player, Williams had leaned on a lesson he learned from Krzyzewski: Learn how to fall in love with the process. Over time, Williams started to apply that mentality to the work he put into his media career. He thought to himself: How do I fall in love with this process? How can I fall in love with this work?
“I think that’s when all those things started to translate for me,” Williams said.
Intentionality is powerful
On the way to drop his daughter off at kindergarten in the morning, Williams recites affirmations with her, hoping to teach her about positive self-talk. She is at a new school with new friends and Williams wants to keep a good mindset towards it all, so together, they repeat:
I’m strong. I’m courageous. I’m gentle. I’m kind.
Williams said some of this comes from his mother.
“She always told me that I have to believe,” he said. “It was always her thing. She would always recite lines to me about, ‘If you don’t believe in yourself, who’s going to believe in you?’”
On Williams’ wrist is one of his first tattoos: Believe.
Set time for yourself
When Williams reminds himself of his affirmations, it’s his signal to take a few moments to engage in practices he knows can help his headspace.
The first is breath work.
“It doesn’t matter where I am, it doesn’t matter what the situation is,” he said. “What you’re doing is you’re releasing a lot of that stress and a lot of that anxiety through your breathing.”
He has a specific routine where he tries to inhale as much as possible before exhaling as much as possible. He repeats that process 30 times. On his last exhale, he releases all of his breath and then proceeds to hold his breath for as long as he can.
He also has a visualization tool he uses during the routine.
“What I do is I let those thoughts come and I let them go with each breath,” he said. “And as I breathe, I think of a string that I have attached to the top of my head and it elongates my body. When I breathe, I take it through my diaphragm and think about straightening myself out and I just close my eyes. And I think just through breath work for me, in that moment, all that other stuff disintegrates.”
Williams constantly reminds himself to “stop and slow down,” so at home he has a box where he and Nikki place their phones each night for an hour and a half, just to get away.
“We sit and we eat with our kids,” he said. “And I think (Nikki) has been very good at forcing me and challenging me to do things.”
When in doubt, Charles Barkley it
While speaking about how he views his life and the way he parents his kids, Williams brought up the triangle offense. If he were to explain in full detail the mechanics of the triangle offense to his audience on TV, the viewers would probably get lost. Instead, he might just point out a screen that contributed to a player scoring. Williams calls this “Charles Barkleying,” after the famed NBA analyst known for his sense of humor and accessibility.
“The metamorphosis process of going through my life, I try to Charles Barkley it,” he said. “I try to simplify it.”
He started to do that at Duke. One of his weaknesses was that he would get too emotionally attached to one play. Describing himself as “type A” and a “little bit of a control freak,” Williams would get derailed if a play didn’t go exactly as he visualized it in his mind, and the play would rattle around in his head.
“If I carry that negative connotation to the next play,” he said, “I’m not in the right mindset to accomplish the next play.”
He learned the best thing for him was to watch a lot of film and confront his mistakes after the game. The film simplified things for him. It allowed him to clearly see what was going on and how to fix it, giving him confidence the next time it happened.
He tries to apply the same principles to his life, breaking everything down in a journal.
“When the day was over, I would take a pen and paper and I would think it through,” he said. “‘What happened today? Where did I go wrong? How did I see it coming into it? Was I truly prepared for that? Was I more reactive? How can I do that one differently?’ I kind of addressed the day in its totality at the end of the day.”
Keep an eye on the water levels of your buckets
Williams called the word balance a trigger for him.
“I think it is a ghost-like term that people casually toss out there like a fish line,” he said.
To him, true balance is unattainable.
Williams views the different parts of his life as buckets that he has to remember to fill. And by viewing them as buckets, it helps reinforce the idea that having them all look the same is too much to worry about.
“When you’re running from fire to fire to fire with buckets of water, you inevitably don’t put out any of the fires,” he said. “Because by the time I pour a bucket of water on this fire, and I’m running back to the well to dip it in more water, there’s five more fires that just came out. And by the end of the day, I’m like, ‘Are any of the fires even out?’”
Instead of worrying about all the buckets in his life all the time – being a husband, being a father, being a broadcaster, being a businessman — he tries to just make sure one bucket doesn’t get too empty at the expense of another.
“There are some buckets that are less filled than others on certain respective days, but I think I have to know for myself that it’s going to be OK,” Williams said. “I can come back to a respective bucket and fill it up a little more to try to even it out. As long as I know that I’m doing my best and I’m also making it a priority that I have the energy to keep filling up those buckets, on a day to day basis, that’s what the brevity of the situation is for me. And that’s taken me a really long time to come to the realization that if I can’t do that, nothing is going to be OK.”
All of these ideas have helped Williams create a better awareness and are part of his ever-evolving process to try to show up as the best version of himself.
(Photo: Lance King / Getty Images)
