Nick Saban Football HC, University of Alabama: Don't Worry about Winning. Just focus on Doing your Job at the Highest Level for Every Single Play and the Wins Will Follow.

Nick Saban focuses on the process over the outcome

The importance of the process

With 6 National Championships, University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban is one of the greatest college football coaches of all time.

But for someone whose name has become synonymous with winning, Saban doesn’t place much emphasis on the end result. He doesn’t care what the final scoreboard says. Instead, Saban tells his assistant coaches and players to just focus on the process.

“Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, in this play, at this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.”

It’s a refreshing perspective. In winner-takes-all fields like sports, results are all that matter. You either win, or you lose. There are no moral victories or consolation prizes. If you don’t win, you don’t eat.

At 11 years old, “Little Nick”, as he was known in his hometown of Monongah, West Virginia, was paying his dues, working at his father’s service station.

When a car pulled up, they would go to work. Little Nick, like his father, would take enormous pride in his work and wouldn’t be content until he’d received his father’s approval.

“The biggest thing I learned and started to learn at 11 years old was how important it was to do things correctly. There was a standard of excellence, a perfection. If we washed a car and there were any streaks when [my father] came, you had to do it over.”

Unbeknownst to him at the time, his father was teaching him an extremely valuable lesson: The importance of only focusing on what you need to do next, and doing it to the best of your ability.

What’s remarkable about Nick Saban’s approach to American football, isn’t his work ethic, nor is it the standard he holds himself and his players to. It’s what his father imparted to him and that which he now imparts to his players: The importance of Process.

“Well, the process is really what you have to do day in and day out to be successful.”

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Instead of asking his players to focus on winning the championship or the next big game, he asks them to focus on what the next action is. The next drill. The next play. The next touchdown.

“We try to define the standard that we want everybody to sort of work toward, adhere to, and do it on a consistent basis. And the things that I talked about before, being responsible for your own self-determination, having a positive attitude, having a great work ethic, having the discipline to be able to execute on a consistent basis, whatever it is you’re trying to do, those are the things that we try to focus on, and we don’t try to focus as much on the outcomes as we do on being all that you can be.”

Decide what you want and the kind of person you’re going to have to be. Ask yourself: “What am I going to have to do consistently in order to have what I want” and commit to the process that’ll help you achieve it and refine it along the way. The outcome – or one you haven’t even considered – will inevitably be a positive one. That, you can believe in.

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