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Friends,

Thank you for joining me again this week. Last week’s letter is the one to keep in mind for this one, and it’s in the archive if you missed it. That one was about the midseason review, which is the scheduled, deliberate version of stepping back and looking at the whole program. This week is about the unscheduled version, the one you run in your head when you just feel like something is off.

ESPN put out a six-part documentary on Nick Saban earlier this month, and the first episode is called “The Process.” That title is doing a lot of work, because if you have spent any time at all around coaching you already know the shape of the idea. Don’t look at the scoreboard. Don’t think about January or March. Do your job on this play, and then do it again on the next one.

Every coach in America has heard some version of that, and most of us believe it. I believe it. So I want to be clear about what is happening in the rest of this letter, which is a leadership advisor in Kentucky, with no national championships to his name, offering Nick Saban a “well, actually.”

The instruction isn’t wrong. It’s incomplete. The half that doesn’t get taught is knowing when to apply it and when to do the opposite.

In 1999, three researchers ran forty soccer players through five weeks of training and then a competition, splitting them into groups by the kind of goals they were given. One group got outcome goals. One got process goals. Two groups got combinations. One got nothing at all.

The groups carrying a combination outperformed everyone, in training and in competition. The groups carrying only one kind of goal performed no better than the group that was given no goals whatsoever.

That last part was a “whoa” for me. Process goals on their own tested no better than nothing. What worked was carrying the outcome and the process at the same time, which means the skill was never picking one over the other. The skill is knowing which one to put in front of a person, and when.

A while back I was talking with a quarterback who had transferred in and was sitting behind somebody on the depth chart. He thought he should be higher. He had just come off a bad practice, and he was well into his own head about it, because in his mind that practice was not just a bad practice. It was a referendum about his place on the depth chart.

What I told him was to stop thinking about the depth chart and think about the next rep. The next throw. Not the season, not the spring, the next one.

That is not a motivational line, and it worked for a reason worth talking about. The depth chart was not something he could do anything about in a single practice. He was carrying something too big for him to act on, and that gap was coming out as pressure. Narrowing his frame closed the gap. It put the thing in his head back to the same size as the thing in his hands.

I have run a few marathons, and the same mechanism is why nobody who finishes one spends mile eleven thinking about the fifteen still to come. You think about the next quarter mile. On a bad day you think about getting to the next tree. The distance has not changed, but what your brain is processing has.

The opposite problem looks nothing like that one, and in the Army it was everywhere. A Soldier in the motor pool at zero five hundred, checking the same vehicle he checked yesterday. A squad running the same battle drill for the two hundredth time. He can execute all of it, and most of the time he is executing it well. What nobody has told him in weeks is what any of it is for.

That Soldier does not need a smaller frame. His frame is already as small as a frame gets. What he is missing is the thing above it, which is why this vehicle matters, what the unit is being built to do, and where he fits inside that. The whole reason we push intent down to the lowest level is to close that exact gap, and when a leader stops doing it, the work continues and the meaning quietly drains out of it.

It shows up in a program the same way. A position group executes the install perfectly and has no idea how any of it connects to Saturday. The effort is there, the understanding is gone, and no amount of narrowing will bring it back.

So the honest answer is not that one of these is right. It is that each one belongs somewhere, and the job is knowing where you are.

There is a second finding worth knowing, and it will change how you narrow your scope. Researchers tested skilled performers under competitive pressure and compared two kinds of narrow focus. One group was given a specific mechanical cue, a single component of the movement to think about. The other was given a global one, the overall feel or rhythm of the skill. The global group performed better under pressure.

Same direction, same good intention, different grain, opposite result.

Which means telling a struggling quarterback to think about the next throw is a completely different instruction from telling him to fix his front foot, and only the former survives pressure. When you make it small for somebody who is already wound up, make it small toward a feeling rather than toward a mechanic. The mechanic is the conversation to have when nothing is at stake.

The widening conversation does not belong in the middle of the struggle. Perspective handed to somebody who is already underwater is just a bigger ocean. It belongs after, once the pressure has come down far enough that a person can use it instead of drowning in it.

There is one more reason to widen: Sometimes a narrow focus is a hiding place. A coach who recuts the practice script for the fourth time this week is doing work he knows how to do, and he is postponing a personnel decision he does not want to make. Small feels like diligence until it becomes avoidance.

The way I have started to lay this out for myself comes down to two questions. How wide is the frame, and did you choose the moment or did the moment choose you?

Most of us spend our time in the narrow row and never schedule the wide one. That is the gap, and it is why last week’s letter and this one are really the same subject.

Pick one person on your roster or your staff who is struggling, and work out which of these two things is happening.

Either they are carrying something they cannot act on, like the quarterback and the depth chart. Or they are acting on plenty and cannot tell you what any of it is for, like the Soldier in the motor pool.

If it is the first, make it smaller, and make it a feeling rather than a mechanic. If it is the second, the conversation is a wider one, and it probably should not happen in the middle of their worst week.

Then tell me which one you found. My guess is that most of you find the first, because it is the more common failure and it is the easier of the two to fix.

If this was useful, forward it to a coach who is in the hard part of the season, and if somebody forwarded it to you, you can subscribe at ianpalmerleadership.com/newsletter.