The Best Way for a Coach to Help Athletes Focus on the Process
To help athletes focus on the process, coaches must teach them that the path to success is to control the controllables and not to worry about things that are uncontrollable. Correspondingly, the process is controllable, and the outcome is uncontrollable.
Underachievers are the ones who give control of their successes and failures to uncontrollable factors. They view their success through the lens of fairness, luck, chance, genetics, and other external factors. On the other hand, high achievers always take responsibility for their fate. High achievers focus on the factors they can control, and logically figure out how to work around the factors they cannot.
Athletes must know that while it’s okay to identify the uncontrollable factors, it’s not okay to give them any power. Athletes must treat the uncontrollable just like an obstacle on an obstacle course and figure out the work around. Then, spend most of their time optimizing the factors under their direct control.
The best way to help athletes adopt this mindset is to break the processes within their control into daily goals. Daily goals enforce patience and consistency by facilitating daily action and daily wins. Daily wins drive motivation and motivation keeps athletes pushing towards more goals. Most importantly, daily goals are easy to be held accountable for, measure, and track which makes them extremally controllable.
If a coach can create a process that uses daily goals, they will give their athletes a significant mindset advantage. This almost guarantees athletes will focus on the process. Moreover, daily goals make the outcome a by-product of the process instead of the purpose of the process. Ultimately, it’s this mindset that helps an athlete enjoy the journey and find meaning in everything they do to prepare to compete.