The Process from Nick Saban

I'm a big football fan. If you watch my videos, you know that I played it all the way through college and it's my favorite sport to watch. But no matter if you like football or not, that's not the point of this video. Obviously there's some great principles to pull from one of the sport's greatest coaches of all time, Nick Saban. He is most known for his role as the head coach at the University of Alabama from 2007 to 2023. He's won seven national championships as a coach and it was likely the best run of any college football dynasty in college football history when he was there at the helm.

But ironic part about his success is that Alabama built its winning mindset without ever even talking about winning. And what I mean by that is that he always talked about the process. He had an aversion to a results driven organization. Instead, he constantly drilled into his team the importance of the process. And maybe you've heard of people talking about it before this piece of the process, but in this video I want to show you how it's an absolute game changer for how you frame success and orient your behavior.

And as a sports psychology professional, as a mental coach, I try to instill this concept of a process oriented mindset into all the people I work with. And I recently read about Saban's philosophy on this topic in this book, the Leadership Secrets of Nick Saban. It's by John Talty and it's one of the best books I've ever read, if I'm being honest. And in it, I just love the way they describe the process. Saban defined it as. It's a daily way of living. It focuses on completing the task ahead you at the moment and not worrying about what happened in the past or what might be around the corner in the future.

So taking from that, it's all about being where your feet are, being in the present moment, and not thinking about the end state of your goal. But what can you do about it right now, in this very moment to give a brief history lesson on Nick Saban. Not because I want to just make you all football enthusiasts, but I want to show you how it started for him and his process. He wasn't always successful as a coach, even though looking back, he was the most successful of all time. He was the head coach of Michigan State university in the mid-90s and he initially struggled.

He had a 19 and 161 record in his first three seasons. And that all changed when he utilized Dr. Lonnie Rosen, a psychiatry professor at Michigan State. And One conversation with Dr. Rosen, Saban said, changed the trajectory of his entire career. And he actually had Rosen follow him along throughout his other coaching stops, all the way up until Alabama. So what was this conversation that they had? Well, it was right before the Michigan State team played undefeated number one Ohio State. Saban asked Dr.

Rosen, what do you tell a team that thinks it has no chance to win? And Rosen's response is what changed Nick Saban's philosophy and is partly why he became one of the most vocal coaches about the use of the mental side of sport. Rosen said that rather than identifying winning the game as a goal, he encouraged Saban to stress winning each play instead. If players could zero in on what they needed to do a few seconds at a time to win the play and could repeat that behavior throughout a game, they tend to get the desired result without making it the focus.

And what's cool, there's a good ending to this story, is that Ohio State actually was beating Michigan State 173 early in the first quarter, and Michigan State fought back and won 28, 24, which at the time was Nick Saban's biggest victory. Sorry for my history rant, but how is that applied moving forward for him? Saban said it changed his career. And he continued to use sports psychology coaches like Rosen and others throughout his career. He had to instill that mindset every day. It wasn't just a one thing, let's say it, and then it's accomplished.

He said this great quote that you have to practice the mindset before you do that mindset, which I love for any mental skill or mental approach to things. And he also had a great quote that later on, when Bama was a great dynasty, he said, people think you've got to win a national championship every year, and if you don't, the season is a waste. We can't teach that to these kids. Our goal is to be better today than we were yesterday. And that showed up where even if his team was blowing out opponents late in games, he would still coach them and be very hard on them and yell at them, even with a few minutes left in a blowout game.

Because he wanted to maintain the standard and try to win each play, each game, regardless of the scoreboard. And as far as how we, you and I and others can use this framing or this mindset of the process is it comes down to the root element of discipline. Saban framed it as a daily decision everyone in the organization has to make. You can either live with the pain of discipline or live with the pain of disappointment. There's trade offs to each but there's a lot of value in choosing that path of discipline and again for the application of this to you all is that focusing on the process to success rather than results is something that any person or organization can do.

The challenging part is following through with it every day regardless of the outcome, winning or losing that you have going on, not letting unproductive self talk overtake you and not worrying about your monthly sales goal or about what one of your co workers is doing. But what can you do about the process right now today to get better? This process requires supreme focus and commitment which Saban has proven to his organization. It gives them the best chance to be successful. So whatever it is you're trying to accomplish adopt that mindset of win each play by breaking your goals into process oriented goals those winnable chunks and that way you can win without even trying to win.