Is your process even worth trusting?

Trust the process

Nick Saban loved to use the phrase “trust the process” as a way to get his players to take their eyes off of the goal of a national championship on a Monday night in January so that they could focus on the task at hand on a Tuesday morning in August with a high level of intent.

Predictably, coaches at other levels started parroting Saban’s “trust the process” without having the context of how he was using it and (presumably) not having a strong process of their own to implement with their teams.

The allure of outcomes

For a field that loves to talk about "process > outcome" we sure are getting hung up on a lot of unimportant outcomes and getting lost in outcome bias. It’s not that outcomes aren’t important, but experience (AND MENTORSHIP) teaches you how to differentiate between the signal and the noise.

For example, we all know speed development is important. However, timing fly 10s every week, posting the “results” may incentivize faster times, but it does not incentivize technical mastery. And if anything, speed development is really about movement efficiency, not about running as fast as possible. 

Situations like this are also perfect examples of Goodhart’s Law at work. Goodhart’s law states “when a measure becomes an outcome, it ceases to become a good measure.” 

This is where knowing your training process inside and out is so critical. Regular measurements are important to monitor adaptations to training, but when you hype them up so much that your athletes treat monitoring like testing, you’ve now made the measurement an outcome; and one you and your athletes become emotionally attached to.

Master technicians

Even as recently as 10 years ago, coaches would have to deliver training sessions with little more than a stopwatch and a track, or a barbell and a platform forcing us to become master craftsmen with only the essential “tools of the trade.”

This level of craftsmanship is completely lost on the modern tech-addicted generation and as such I think young coaches would be much better served doubling down on becoming better technicians instead of chasing whatever the most popular technology of the week might be.

I also think the whole using technology to "drive intent" is just a coverup for shitty coaching.

Technical mastery matters in movement and in coaching and good coaching will always drive intent much better than technology.

At the risk of being dubbed the “old man shouting at the cloud”, I'm not saying tech isn't useful, I use $50k in tech on a weekly basis in my job. 

But if you can't use your coaching eye to assess how an athlete executes the first, second, and third pulls of a clean and then give appropriate feedback to correct their technical execution, it doesn't matter how fast the bar is moving...

So what can you do about all this?

Well, for one, you can spend a day or even a week coaching without any form of technology. Then reflect on that experience, not the outcomes, the actual experience.

• What did you learn?
• How did your connections with your athletes change?
• What happened to your own intent and level of focus?
• How did you solve problems when they popped up?

After careful reflection, figure out if there are times when you’re using technology as a crutch and start to pare back your dependency on it.

Coaching will always be an interpersonal experience and the more we allow technology to encroach into that experience, the less effective we are as coaches and the more we just become exercise facilitators.

Next steps

If you want to become a more well-rounded and effective coach, my Coaches’ Conditioning Course - Level 1 launches next month!

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Thanks for reading!

Tim