3 Things I’ve Learned From Football Coaching:

3 Things I’ve learned from football coaching:

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1.????? Everything starts with the head

2.????? Trial and error

3.????? Be relentless about improvement

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Over the last four years I have been helping to coach my son’s football team and have specialised in goalkeeping as Toby (my lad) is a goalie.

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We have a nice little group of three goalies across two teams and Monday night’s training session was a good one. It started with the coach of the other team, who won their semi final on Sunday, giving me some positive feedback on the improvements in his keeper. When I reflected on what we have been doing in the sessions over the last few months, I boiled it down to the three things and thought it would be good to explain what they mean and share.

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I also wanted to give credit to where I got the ideas from:

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1.????? Everything starts with the head – from Dave Lewis (Recruitment Trainer), Martin Robert Hall (Leadership Coach) and every decent cricket coach I had when I was growing up.

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This is physically, mentally and emotionally. Before you kick a ball and lift the phone or do anything, the thing that sticks in my mind came from fairly recent training sessions from Dave and Martin. Everything starts with mindset. Choosing your attitude and focus before doing anything has the biggest bearing on the eventual outcome.

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When I started coaching the sessions with the group of goalies, one of the first challenges that we had to tackle was that the players were beating themselves up about errors or about conceding goals, even when it wasn’t their fault. So, before we even kicked a ball, we had to agree on how we were going to approach the sessions and what to expect. The message was that mistakes and errors are part of the improvement process, so we have to get comfortable with them and to have a healthy relationship with errors. Every now and then we still see frustration coming through, but I feel that the time it takes to mentally reset after an error has certainly reduced. The result is that the players seem to be more engaged and have a smile on their faces.

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Forgetting errors and moving on quickly also reduces the risk of one mistake snowballing into two, three or four mistakes and a downward spiral.

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From a physical standpoint, I always start with keeping the head stable so that the players can get a good fix on the ball and stay balanced to give themselves the best chance on making the save. This was something drilled into me by when I was playing cricket as a kid. If you can’t see the ball you can’t hit it or catch it.

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2.????? Trial and Error – from the Sport and Exercise Science department at Coventry University.

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This seems a bit trivial or even sloppy in terms of an approach to something that involves a lot of technical elements and athleticism, but one of the first things that I learned from doing my Sport Science degree some 20 years ago was that science is just trial and error.

…It’s just very controlled, methodical, and well-tested trial and error.

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So, once we have the head set in the right place, we can then start testing different ways to achieve the best outcomes but in a way that suits the individual. I feel this is one of the best ways to go about any activity either in sport or in businesses, especially complex and demanding activities like goalkeeping, as every individual is physically and mentally different. This approach is about finding the most effective method for that person.

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I find this the most fun part of coaching as this allows us to take a creative approach and it can be really rewarding to see things pay off. It’s also really easy to stop things when they’re not working and back track to the last time things were working.

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Finally, I feel trial and error leaves infinite possibilities which is really key for longevity and long-term growth.

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3.????? Be relentless on improvement – Sir Dave Brailsford and Tim Grover. Also a bloke called Bernard who was my driving instructor.

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Lots of people will be familiar with Sir Dave Brailsford’s marginal gains approach and with Tim Grover as the personal trainer to Michael Jordan and author of many books including ‘Relentless.’

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Let’s start with one of the best bits of advice I ever received, which was from my driving instructor – Bernard. He said, “You don’t learn in a straight line, you learn in steps. You’ll get frustrated, that you’ll struggle for a while and won’t feel an improvement, but you will be getting better. Then something will click and you’ll go up a step. Then you struggle away again.”

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This is the same principle that Dave Brailsford talks about with his ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ which a lot of people shorten to ‘marginal gains’ and forget about the aggregation bit. The bit where you don’t just do it once, but do it day after day after day and so on.

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For me, the phrase about being relentless on improvement reminds me that I have to try and find an improvement everyday, although I am reminded that I might not see the positive result everyday because sometimes it’s just not that straight forward. The main thing is that over the long-term, it pays off.