you have to do is you have to have toughness all right you got to be tougher than everybody that we play all right but you know I've never stood up here and all the time that I've been here and never really defined toughness for you the way I'm going to Define toughness to you because I'm talking about mental toughness and I think everybody can relate to it is it's all about what does it take to break you and the reason I come to this is we had to put hurricane windows in our house in Florida
on the beach all right so I asked the guy how do you how do you figure out that these windows are better than those windows what does it take to break them all right so if you really think about toughness and mental toughness what does it take to break you I don't care what circumstance you're taking faced with what does it take to break your focus because you get frustrated about what happened on the last play what does it take to make you give in because it's hot outside or you're tired or you don't feel
like running to the ball or giving effort or finishing the play like you should because of how you feel whether you're a little bit hurt what does it take to break you I'm not saying it's our goal to try to break you it's just the way it is in football when you go through Camp it's going to be difficult because you're getting yourself ready to play an entire season at a high level so everybody here has got to have a lot of mental toughness to be able to sustain what we do at a high level
and just because you got beat on the last play that can't affect the next play or that's breaking you your frustration is breaking you just cause you miss a block or you get blocked or you miss a tackle or you fumble the ball what does it take to break you we broke Waddell last night [Music] you know the I say this to every team and I give them this sermon every team the beginning of the season because I want them to relate to this you know if you want to be happy for an hour eat
a steak you want to be happy for a day those plays all if you want to be happy for a week go and approved you want to be happy for a month to go buy a new Farm so if you want to be happy in your life just ask yourself one question if I didn't show up here today would anybody miss my ass because then you know you accomplished something of significance to always relate this back to if you could just be the best you can be I always relate this though this is said the
best and I'm paraphrasing this Martin Luther King this must have been 67 years ago gave a speech about the street sweepers but he started out saying there's a shoe shine guy in Montgomery Alabama at the green stamp store who the only guy I'll let shine my shoe because the pride and performance that guy has in shining refuses and the great feeling he has when you tell him he did a good job and he goes on to say if you're going to be a street sweeper be the best street sweeper in the world sweep the streets
like Michelangelo's been in the Sistine Chapel like Shakespeare wrote literature let him post a sign that says the best street super in the world lives right here because if you do that you accomplish the best there is in life which is knowing you did your best to be the best you could be no matter what you choose to do now for me that says it all that says it as well as you can say now the challenge is is that's not natural it's not normal what I said before Human Nature is to be what it's
just to survive to win the championship it's not to be special it's not to have the best business it's just to do good enough so that's a challenge that we offer thank you um you know these guys sort of don't they all think they have this illusion of choice like I can do whatever I want to do and we kind of have a younger generation now that doesn't always get told no they don't always get told this is exactly how you need to do it so they have this illusion that they have all these choices
but the fact of the matter is is if you want to be good you really don't have a lot of choices because it takes what it takes you have to do what you have to do to be successful so you have to make the choices and decisions to have the discipline and the focus to the process of what you need to do to accomplish your goals and all these guys that think they have a lot of choices are really you know sort of sadly mistaken and I think as we all have done with our own
children they learn these lessons of life as they get older and sometimes the best way to learn is from the mistakes that you make even though we all hate to see and have to make them I mean we don't really condone it when they do foreign been one of these guys that was a raw raw emotional inspirational kind of a guy to get the team ready to play and there's probably one really memorable game that sort of almost changed the whole dynamic so the psychological approach that we use to motivate teams and it happened when
we played Ohio State in 1998 and they had been number one all the way through we were four and five not a very good team and we won that game and we decided to use the approach that we were not going to focus on the outcome that 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 like it had a history and a life of its own don't look at the scoreboard don't look at any other external
factors just all your focus all your concentration all your effort all your toughness all your discipline to execute went into that particular play and 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 that you would do that for 60 minutes in the game and then you would be able to live with the results regardless of what those results were great hey guys that's a great win tremendous job by everybody on this football team getting
ready for the games preparing well staying focused not getting caught up and going out and executing doing a tremendous job on offense defense played great for a long time lost a little bit in the end special to everybody did a great job if you look at our record from that time on since we sort of changed our approach this is the end of the 98 season 99 was a pretty good year LSU we had some pretty good years and so I I think that I've convinced myself through the years that the process oriented approach is
much much better and it's much better for competitors because it keeps them focusing on the right things not the results but what it takes to get the results
