Welcome back! In our first blog we talked about focusing in competition and introduced The Process of Alabama’s Coach Nick Saban.  Saban is viewed by many as the dean of collegiate football. He’s won 7 national championships. Rece Davis, the ESPN commentator, described Saban’s process this way:

The Process is briliant in its simplicity. If you simply execute what's important at the moment to the best of your ability, without undue regard for outome, your chances of...getting the result you want increase exponentially. It sounds great, until you actually have to chase worry about winning or pressure or outside expectations out of your mind (from the preface to P. Savage’s 4^th and Goal Every Day. 2017). So what does the Process look and feel like in action?  First, let’s recognize that focusing is a skill like shooting foul shots, or  throwing a baseball or softball. To build focusing skills, we mainly exercise two parts of the midbrain, the amygdala and the left side of the hippocampus. On our varsity football team, we do at least five minutes of exercising these parts of the brain.  Many people would describe this type of exercise as mindfulness meditation -  attending to what we’re doing right now, not the past or future, or our emotions and feelings. To describe The Process experience, I’ll use my experience playing pickleball because the key points are fairly simple. Pickleball is a game growing in popularity that is like tennis but on a notably smaller court. As a result volleys go back and forth much faster. I typically play doubles with my wife. I know that if I return 80% of the shots I’m able to return, we most likely will win. My stance and stroke are good, so I don’t have to pay much attention to those two pieces.  All I have to do is attend to each volley as it comes. This is analogous to Coach Saban teaching his players to execute one play at a time to the best of their ability.

Here’s a picture of the yellow pickleball coming over the net toward me.  You’re right, it’s not too exciting! In part, that’s the point.  I transfer my practicing in focusing described above to locking on to the yellow ball, and simply returning each volley, one after another. In fact, the attention required to  visually lock on the ball  all the way through the stroke on every stroke  takes up a lot of mental energy, especially with the speed at which volleys go back and forth. As a result, if I’m really focused, there’s little room for anything else cognitively, especially disruptive thoughts. I’ll follow up next time with how to coach Saban’s Process along with examples.

Hi and Welcome!   My goal in this series of blogs is to begin a conversation about using social-emotional learning (SEL) to further our athletes' life skills.  In so doing, our teams will be more successful. We'll also go a step beyond the core life skills so we can add to everyone's toolkit. Let's start with focusing, one of the most important self management skills. A few years ago, our football team at Far Rockaway High School was playing a Queens rival. As the opposing team's players came off their bus at our field our coach said to me , "Art, look at the back of their jerseys." On the back of each jersey was a number, but no last name above it. Instead, there was just one word, "Focus." On every jersey. I'm sure everyone can relate a story about a player not focusing and the negative outcome that resulted. Herm Edwards, who has had a long coaching career at Arizona State and in the NFL (Tampa Bay, Kansas City, and New York Jets) said this about his experience at Tampa Bay: "Every play in football- every play- someone messes up. Most of the time, it's not physical. It’s mental (Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit, p. 79) How do we train our players to focus better?  A good place to start is with Coach Nick Saban's "The Process." Saban has won seven national college football championships, one at Louisiana State and six at Alabama, the last just this past season. One of the best descriptions of The Process is by Rece Davis, an ESPN commentator, in his Foreward to Phil Savage's 2017 book on Alabama football  entitled, 4^th and Goal Every Day.

"How does Saban do it? The Process is brilliant in its simplicity. If you simply execute what's important at the moment to the best of your ability, without undue regard for outcome, your chances of...getting the result you want increase exponentially. It sounds great, until you actually have to chase worry about winning or pressure or outside expectations out of your mind....From my vantage point; this hasn't been merely a step-by-step get-rich-quick scheme. It's an entirely different mental approach. It's training the mind…it’s finding joy and fulfillment in the moment…" The "joy" comes from our regularly achieving success in frequent, manageable steps- even daily. We can view it as the driving force behind a growth mindset because the sense of achievement we experience motivates us on to the next manageable step, and on and on. Here's a link to a brief video where, at the 2:35 minute mark, Saban is being interviewed by an ESPN commentator about the Process. The video begins with his players chanting "Get your mind right!" before the start of a game. So, what does the Process feel like in action? I'll describe that in our next blog. In the meantime, please respond with your thoughts and questions on the "Contact" page at my website, www.arthurpopp.com or at drpopp2@gmail.com