“SOMETHING FINALLY CLICKED”: Alabama 34, Oklahoma 24
The Mystery of the "Click"
This past Friday the NCAA college football playoffs began with Alabama playing Oklahoma. Alabama was being dominated. Outplayed and down 17–0. Then something shifted. They turned it around and won the game 38–24.
After the game, reporters asked the coach, “What happened?” His answer was simple: “Something finally clicked.”
What Is “Clicking”?
Forget football for a moment. The words that coach used could come from any locker room, boardroom, classroom, or family.
We’ve all heard the term, but what does it actually mean?
You can’t hear a click. You can’t see it. You can’t touch it. Yet we recognize it immediately because performance changes. Momentum shifts. Whoever is “clicking” at the right time suddenly starts doing better.
When someone or some group is gelling, meshing, or hitting it off, what is actually occurring?
Energy changes. What was fragmented begins to move together.
These words point to something real, but they don’t explain it. They describe the result, not the process.
The “Chemistry”
The metaphoric term ‘Chemistry’ is used a great deal when two actors seem to be performing well together, or when a team like Alabama suddenly pulls all of their behaviors together to perform at a higher level – TOGETHER.
In its truest sense, chemistry is about properties changing when elements combine. So, what properties do people have that would help explain what is truly going on when performance changes into a powerful single unit working together.
Alabama was doing better and seemed to…well….CLICK!!!!
The Science Behind the Click
In our Interactive Perceptual Psychology (IPP) research, we aimed to demonstrate a method to bring individuals and teams into alignment, activating internal properties and to measure the resulting changes in performance. Specifically, we examined how alignment and activation reduced anxiety and burnout while producing measurable improvements in individual and team outcomes. We hypothesized that our leadership development process, F.O.C.U.S., could activate these internal properties within individuals and groups, producing a shift in performance.
The research confirmed it. What we were observing and measuring were two interdependent processes that explain what people describe as “clicking”: Alignment and Activation.
Alignment and Activation are not abstract ideas. They are synergistic and symbiotic processes that occur when the three components of human behavior—thinking, feeling, and acting—come into sync. When those components are aligned, their energy unifies. When that unified energy is released, performance changes. That release is Activation.
From Mystery to Mastery
This is exactly what Alabama’s coach had been trying to accomplish all season: getting his players’ thinking, emotions, and actions pulling in the same direction together. When it finally happened, you could see it. You could feel it. It looked effortless, powerful, and cohesive. People often call that moment “magic,” but magic is simply what we call something we don’t yet understand.
But how does it happen? Why did it take so long for his team and the coaches to have it occur last Friday night? What actually happens when psychological compounds are placed together and produce a separate but more dynamic energy? And most importantly—can it be replicated?
IPP – Interactive Perceptual Psychology: The Model
Our work says yes—but only if you have a model.
Medicine thrives because it's built on systems: respiratory, genetic, neurological—each interacting predictably within a larger structure. Medicine works because it is built on models that explain internal systems and their interactions. We don’t guess which antibiotics to combine; we rely on research, diagnosis, and predictable outcomes. Human performance deserves the same rigor. IPP functions as a behavioral model in much the same way medicine functions as a physiological one. When you understand the internal properties involved, you can reproduce the results.
Understanding Alignment and Activation begins with three steps.
First is diagnosis
Just as a physician must understand the internal condition of a patient, leaders and coaches must understand how people are designed internally. We measure how individuals think, feel, and act through the Winning Profile, which assesses neurologically pre-wired properties present at birth.
Second is interpretation
Using a triangulation process, we integrate those three components into a three-dimensional psychological outline. This reveals how a person’s internal systems interact, where alignment already exists, and where energy is being lost.
Third is implementation
Once those internal properties are understood, we design interactions that accelerate alignment and activate energy within individuals and teams. This process is operationalized through what we call the EQ Accelerator, producing predictable changes in engagement, efficacy, and performance.
This is how we explain what people call clicking, meshing, or gelling—behaviorally, just as medicine explains wellness physiologically. Homeostasis maintains balance in the body. Alignment maintains balance in human performance.
When someone says, “Something finally clicked,” that statement is no longer vague.
“Something” is now defined.
“Finally” reflects the expected outcome of a systematic process.
“Clicked” is the activation of unified internal energy.
Other disciplines use different language for the same phenomenon. Musicians call it harmony—when individual notes combine into chords and their properties change, producing something richer and more powerful than any single sound. Human performance works the same way. Mental, emotional, actional are the totality of where behavioral components align, and a new level of energy emerges.
To come from behind 17 points to Win a game by 10 is not perfect but it is a sign and feeling of Greatness! And greatness, when understood, is no longer accidental.
This is the foundation of our Leadership Development model: a process that can be taught, replicated, and scaled—once you understand its methods.