Latest / Mental Per4mance Daily with Adam Rutz / Saban: Five Choices In Life
Transcript
- Adam Rutz: Every single day, whether you realize it or not, you're making a choice about the level of performance you're willing to accept from yourself. In 2019, Nick Saban shared a lesson with his Alabama football team that he had picked up from fellow coach Freddie Kitchens. He said, We all have five choices in life. We can be bad at what we do, we can be average, we can be good, we can be excellent, or we can be elite. Now, here's what I love about Saban's message. He explained that your God-given ability and natural talent might be enough to make you good at something. But if you want to become excellent or elite, that requires something more. It requires a special level of intensity, focus, commitment, drive, and passion to consistently perform at a high standard. And here's the mental performance lesson: talent might determine where you start. But your daily choices and behaviors have a tremendous influence on how far you can go. Think about a talented college football player. His natural ability might earn him a scholarship, but it's his preparation, attention to detail, willingness to be coached, and commitment to improvement that give him the opportunity to reach his potential. And that applies to anything we're pursuing. You can be naturally gifted at sales or leadership or teaching or running a business. But being gifted doesn't automatically mean you're going to become the best version of yourself. Because excellence isn't just the level of performance you achieve, it's a standard of behavior you choose to live by. And those choices show up in the little things you do every single day, especially when nobody's watching. So here's your process for today. Choose one area of your life where you want to perform at a higher level. Ask yourself, what does average preparation look like in this area? And what would excellent or elite preparation require from me? Then identify one specific behavior you need to improve and commit to executing it today. Because choosing to be elite isn't about calling yourself elite. It's about consistently making the decisions, doing the preparation, and developing the discipline that give you the opportunity to perform at that level. You don't become elite because you want to be. you give yourself the opportunity to become elite by what you repeatedly choose to do. Mindset, process, discipline, execution. That's Mental Performance Daily.