Nick Saban, the Head Football Coach at Alabama, has coached six teams to National Championships, winning his first in 2003 at LSU.
 
In an interview, from The Big Book Of Saban, compiled by Alex Kirby, Coach Saban discussed how a different approach is helpful in motivating today's players:
 
"It's an instant coffee, instant tea, instant self-gratification culture. Everything is on the Internet. Everything is a picture. Everything is fast. Everything is quick. There is not the same long-term commitment to something and sticking with it and learning from your mistakes.

I think with a lot of players right now, you must use a little different approach. But I think that at the end of the day they all want to be good. They all want to reach their full potential. And they all have a willingness that if you can help them do that, they have a respect for you, and they will give you everything they can to do it.
 
I think, first of all, you have to have the respect of the audience, so you have to have the respect of the players, which I think you get by them knowing that you have their best interest in mind and helping them develop a career off the field as well as athletically.
 
Our Mission Statement has always been to create an atmosphere and environment for players to be successful first as people.
 
We have a personal development aspect to our program that there's principles and values in the organization relative to developing a successful philosophy, creating the right kind of habits, thoughts, habits and priorities that are going to help you make good decisions, whether it's the Pacific Institute for Leadership Development coming in, whether it's a peer intervention program that address behavioral issues, drugs, alcohol, gambling, spiritual development, how to treat other genders; we spend a lot of time trying to develop personalities on our team, characteristics that will help them be more successful, be more successful in life."
 
Alabama football players are committed to hard work and constant improvement because their Coach demonstrates by his actions that he is more interested in helping them achieve success as people than as just football players.
 
What do you demonstrate to your team members by your actions?
 

​Nick Saban, the Head Football Coach at Alabama, has coached six teams to National Championships, winning his first in 2003 at LSU.
 
The tipping point for Coach Saban occurred in 1998 when he was coaching at Michigan State, because of the influence of his friend, Psychiatry Professor Lonny Rosen. Saban already had a legendary work ethic and attention to detail, but in 1998 in the week leading up to the Ohio State Game, Rosen sold him on a new mental approach which is now referred to as "The Process".
 
In an interview with the Lansing State Journal in 2003, Rosen explained some of his views on athletes and performance. "Motivation itself generally lasts about two plays—it's highly overrated. Give me a team that has a business-like attitude, a team that can deal with adversity when it comes. The most destructive phenomenon in sports is relief. It's typically followed by a decrease in performance."
 
In his book, The Making of a Coach, Monte Burke recounted the new approach Saban and Rosen agreed upon: "The Spartans, and their coach, would, starting in practice that week, take it one step at a time. Each player would focus on his individual responsibility. Rosen emphasized that the average play in the football game lasted about seven seconds. The players would concentrate only on winning those seconds, take a rest between plays, then do it all over again. There would be no focus at all on the scoreboard or on the end result."
 
Coach Saban recounted the importance of that week:
 
"There's probably one really memorable game that changed the whole dynamics of the psychological approach we use to motivate teams, and it happened when we played at Ohio State in 1998.They had been #1 all the way through, and we were 4-5 and not a very good team. We decided to use the approach that we are not going to focus on the outcome. We were just going to focus on the process of what it took to play the best football you could play – which was to focus on that particular play as if it had a history and life of its own.
 
Don't look at the scoreboard, don't look at any external factors, just put all your focus and all your concentration, all your effort, all your toughness, all your discipline to execute that play. Regardless of what happened on that play, success or failure, you would move on to the next play and have the same focus to do that on the next play, and you'd then do that for 60 minutes in a game and then you'd be able to live with the results, regardless of what those results were."
 
Michigan State was behind 29-9 with ten minutes to go in the third quarter. Undeterred, they came back and won 28-24. "The Process" was born.
 
What's your process?
 

​Sometimes when two people have a conversation, the person doing most of the listening takes away something completely different than the person doing most of the talking intended. This situation also occurs in a group setting because different people in the same audience may take away different ideas from the same presentation which may or may not be what the presenter intended.
 
As the Woman's Soccer Coach at the University of North Carolina, Anson Dorrance's teams have won 22 National Championships. Coach Dorrance coached the Women's Soccer team at UNC for 33 years and the men's team for 13 years. In his fantastic book, Training Soccer Champions, with Tim Nash, Coach Dorrance gave an example of the way different audiences respond differently to the same content.
 
"You don't need to show a videotape to a women's team to critique them. If you are in front of a group of men giving them general criticisms of a game, a videotape is crucial. If you are saying there was not enough defensive pressure in the game, every male in the room is think¬ing, "Yeah I was the only one working out there. The rest of you were useless." In his mind, he immediately blames everyone else for the lack of defensive pressure.
 
If you made that general criticism to a women's team, and said, "This is garbage. Our defensive pressure was terrible." Every woman in the room would think, "He's talking about me."
 
I find it interesting that a male will look at the video and see everyone making mistakes, including himself, and start to blame everyone else for his inability. But a woman will see herself and take full responsibility for that problem emotionally. With women, a video is more effectively used to show that they can play well and to show the positive aspects of the performance.
 
Not that you can never show negative aspects of a performance to a women's team, but seeing their mistake on tape does not really help them. If you tell them they made a mistake, they'll believe you.
 
I do not want to pretend that men do not respond to positive things, but you must have a balance of showing the positive and the neg¬ative. Coaches tend to only stop practice during an entirely negative environment to point out and correct mistakes. Yet one of the best times to stop a training session is during or right after a brilliant series of performances to confirm exactly what you want."
 
Who's in your audience?

​As the Woman's Soccer Coach at the University of North Carolina for 33 years, Anson Dorrance's teams have won 22 National Championships. In his in his fantastic 1996 book, Training Soccer Champions, with Tim Nash, he shares some great insights as to why "Complete Communication" includes more than just our words:
 
"Though trial and error, I have learned that the women I have coached listen less to what I say than to how I say it. In other words, they listen less to the language and more to the tone. If my tone is negative, it doesn't matter how positive the words are. They are going to hear negative.
 
If your body language is negative, it doesn't matter how careful you are in constructing your sentences to create a positive impression. It still comes out negative. Women listen to your tone and watch your body language, regardless of what comes out of your mouth.
 
They are discovering in research that a woman has so many other faculties in her brain that she draws on in a conversation, and these faculties are above and beyond her intellectual interpretation of the words you are using to communicate.
 
She is looking at your body language, and she is listening to your tone. Through a combination of all these factors, she is deciphering exactly what you are thinking about her regardless of what you are saying. It's crucial when you are coaching women to use the correct tone and body language to communicate, or at least have some sort of positive approach even if you are being critical.
 
If you are criticizing a woman in training — and obviously sometimes you are going to — they have to get a sense that it's nothing personal."
 
Anisha Sipporah, in this excerpt from her wonderful poem "Tone of Voice", describes the impact of "Complete Communication" as it relates to children:
 
"It's not so much what you say,
As the manner in which you say it;
It's not so much the language you use,
As the tone in which you convey it.

'Come here, ' I sharply said,
And the child cowered and wept.
'Come here, ' I said; he looked and smiled,
And straight to my lap he crept."
 
It is valuable to be mindful of your "Complete Communication" as a speaker and a listener and to be aware of the impact on the other person.
 
Are you?

As the Women's Soccer Coach at the University of North Carolina, Anson Dorrance's teams have won 22 National Championships. In his fantastic 1996 book, Training Soccer Champions, with Tim Nash, Coach Dorrance describes the parallels between an effective coach and an effective parent:
 
"Coaching is a lot like parenting. Parents who have produced some of the greatest kids I know, are unbelievable nags... in a positive sense. They are always reminding their kids what to do. They are constructing a behavior for their children that will eventually become natural. By insisting that they perform this way, their children become the sort of people they want them to become. But it does not happen by accident. It is because there is a constant effort by the parents to instruct.
 
Coaching and motivating players are the same way. Telling a player to get fit, for example, is not good enough. You must instruct them about the process - how often, what kind (aerobic, anaerobic, or combinations), what intensity - so they are thoroughly educated.
 
You nag them about it constantly because it will rarely be a natural inclination. You tease them about it if other methods do not work. Sometimes you are sarcastic, sometimes you are serious. Sometimes you bring them in one-on-one and talk about their wonderful potential and let them know the steps they need to take to reach it. You have to find their button because everyone is different."
 
Players who have been effectively coached can help build culture.Coach Dorrance gave this example:
 
"The culture for the women's national team is you come into training camps fit. A lot of players do not follow what the coach would like the culture to be. They follow the player's culture. They have heard the coach say, "You've got to come in fit," and they say to the other players, "He's not serious about this is he?" They hope to hear the other player say that the coach is not serious, he says that every year and nobody ever comes in fit. But what they will hear from the players on the national team is that if they do not come in fit, they are in trouble, and likely, they will struggle. The veterans tell the new players, "You come in fit. That's all there is to it." The players come in fit. That is the culture.
 
Do your team members help establish your culture?

As the women's Soccer Coach at the University of North Carolina, Anson Dorrance's teams have won 22 National Championships. Coach Dorrance and Coach Wooden had similar approaches to coaching. Coach Wooden once reminded a former player turned coach: "You haven't taught until they learned.", responding to the coach's frustration with his players inabilities to properly execute fundamentals.
 
In his fantastic 1996 book, Training Soccer Champions, with Tim Nash, Coach Dorrance articulated his views on Real Coaching:
 
"There is a difference between telling somebody to do something and teaching them how to do it. Telling someone to do something is what an inexperienced coach feels coaching is all about. He stands on the sideline, rants and raves, screaming: "I can't believe it. I've told you not to clear the ball into the middle. If you don't clear it high and wide, they are going to finish that chance. How many times do I have to tell you not to clear the ball in the middle?" Well, there's someone who doesn't coach.
 
If you must yell at them from the sidelines, you haven't coached them. If you have coached something into someone, guess what, they are going to do it. Coaching is about effect. Telling someone the correct way to do something is not necessarily coaching them. If the coach is spending his practice teaching session lecturing his players with how much he knows about the game, he certainly isn't coaching them to perform. Maybe the best coaches are the ones who make the game seem simple and don't complicate practice with long-winded theories on how to play."
 
Coach Wooden liked to quote legendary basketball coach John Bunn who wrote: "Don't take thirty minutes to say something you should say in thirty seconds."
 
Coach Dorrance had excellent advice for Coaches who were great players: "Their natural abilities preclude them from an understanding of the process of typical player development, making them less effective coaches. To be effective coaches, they must work harder to be patient and learn the details about the process."
 
He provided a different caution for Coaches who had not been great players. "The coaches with the lackluster soccer resumes need to temper their lectures and not feel they have to prove their knowledge."
 
Coach Dorrance and Coach Wooden were great teachers, not just talkers. They made sure their players had enough time in practice to get their needed repetitions by being clear, concise and compelling in their instruction.
 
How can you improve?

As the Women's Soccer Coach at the University of North Carolina, Anson Dorrance's teams have won 22 National Championships In 42 years. Coach Wooden and Coach Dorrance both had practice environments that were fiercely competitive between the players but when practice was over the fierce competitors were friends.
 
Coach Wooden maintained this balance by never letting players criticize each other, keeping the focus on their own best effort as opposed to trying to be better than someone else, demanding emotional self-control and keeping basketball in proper perspective.
 
In his fantastic 1996 book, Training Soccer Champions, with Tim Nash, Coach Dorrance discusses how he tried to keep the balance between fierce practice competition and friendly players:
 
"I have never looked at competition in any sort of negative light. For me, the competition itself is the only thing in which I am competitive. Once the competition is over, it isn't an issue anymore.
 
And I think winning and losing gracefully is critical. In our program, we try to maintain a balance between furious competition and a light-heartedness because there can be all kinds of negative spin-offs from competition. It can shatter team chemistry. It can create an environment that is oppressive.
 
And what I like about what has happened over the years here at North Carolina is that we have figured out a way to make the practice environments unbelievably competitive. But the rest of the time — even when the drill is over, and the young women are jogging to the water fountain — it's lighter. We figured out a way to maintain that balance.
 
Competition is an underlying theme to what we do at UNC, but there are a lot of other themes as well. If we used competition as the only aspect of what we do here, we'd be missing the point. In fact, the players don't talk about it. Those are not the memories they take with them.
 
I remember one-time Keri Sanchez and I were invited to be on the ACC Hotline radio show, and we talked about the program here. Keri was asked a question point-blank. Mick Mixon, the host, said, "Pretend Anson isn't here, and tell us what you have learned most from the program at UNC?" Keri said, "Most of the things I've taken from the program have nothing to do with soccer. They have to do with life and relationships." Competition is something that is woven into the fabric of our player development. But it is not what the players feel, and that's what is important."
 
John Wooden and Anson Dorrance were two of the fiercest competitors in the history of college sports. They were able to achieve amazing results over the long run, in part because they were able to create an extremely competitive team environment every day in practice but maintain proper perspective and thus not let the competition between team members ruin their relationships.
 
It is an example from which any sales organization could benefit from.
 
Are your team members fierce and friendly?