By John Portch

Dr Áine MacNamara touches upon a perennial challenge in talent ID and development, a field in which her research is extensive.

“Early success does not always equal later success,” she tells the Leaders Performance Institute, “but, in some ways, our pathways drive early success to get into the pathway, get funding and get competition opportunities.”

It presents a challenge to pathway coaches and environments, but MacNamara, an Associate Professor in Elite Performance and co-lead of the Coaching and Expertise Lab (Co|Ex Lab) in the School of Health and Human Performance at Dublin City University explains where the balance must be struck.

“There’s a bandwidth of performance early that drives both motivation, technical and tactical coaching opportunities,” she continues, “and all of those development factors will propel athletes towards success. That means that at the start of the pathway, coaches and systems need to look beyond just what makes someone good now towards consideration of those factors that support later development.”

These factors are influenced by an athlete’s proximity to performance (this is how urgently an individual athlete needs to deliver performance based on their stage in the pathway and current demands).

Then there is the question of temporality. Rather than simply the linear progression of time, temporality “is inherently fluid”, as MacNamara and her co-authors Ger Barry and Jamie Taylor wrote in their recent research paper.

“Temporality”, they wrote, “varies across individuals, shaped by unique personal experiences and subjective perspectives” and, rather than isolated moments, it is “a continuous flow where each experience is shaped by both past events and future expectations.” So one young athlete may be ready for senior competition at 17 years old; another may not.

In either case, “temporality can create a series of temporal reference points for coaches to help them coach for development and performance as required.”

MacNamara tells the Leaders Performance Institute that the balance comes back to the coach’s intentions. “A coach must ask themselves what was I planning for that session, in this block, this season for the athlete or the team? How did I go about it? How did I review it? How does the athlete experience it?”

With all this in mind, we asked MacNamara to reflect on the characteristics of good pathway environments. We highlight ten that cover system prerequisites, environmental features, and day-to-day practice.

1. Multiple entry and exit points

Talent identification and development is not predictable. It is dynamic, non-linear and individual. “Because a 14-year-old swimmer isn’t just a 14-year-old swimmer,” says MacNamara. “They come with a range of individual factors and experiences.”

High quality pathways, she explains, are designed with multiple entry and exit routes that take into account that young athlete’s proximity to performance. “If I go and pick the best 14-year-olds for my pathway I’m probably going to include people who look good now but without the potential to be good later,” she continues, “and I’m at risk of excluding people who don’t look good now but have the potential to develop later.”

As for exit points, it may be that attrition rates are close to 99% but that is to be expected. “Conversion is a pretty poor metric to evaluate a talent development pathway,” she says of a topic that has long been at the heart of her research. “Even in the best environments there’s only finite space for athletes to develop into.”

Nevertheless, good pathway programmes equip young athletes with the “developmental constructs to be successful elsewhere”.

2. Firm understanding of an athlete’s ‘priors’

If coaches are to meet the demands of such a complex environment, they must develop both horizontal and vertical knowledge across their system’s curriculum.

“In a coaching context, horizontal curriculum knowledge informs what experiences might be desirable for athletes at specific stages of development, ensuring these experiences align with broader developmental goals,” write Barry, MacNamara and Taylor. “Vertical curriculum knowledge equips coaches to understand an athlete’s previous experience and anticipate the steps required to achieve desired future performance.”

Coaches generally possess strong horizontal knowledge but can lack that vertical understanding of an athlete’s “priors”, which is defined by Barry, MacNamara and Taylor as the experiences, beliefs, expectations and habits the athlete brings into the learning environment.

An athlete’s priors shape how they interpret coaching, respond to challenge and adapt over time and so, as MacNamara tells the Leaders Performance Institute, “coaches with a broad understanding of everything that’s happening across the pathway and a high level understanding of what they’re delivering” are best-placed to meet the development and performance needs of their young athletes.

“The ultimate job of a talent pathway is to develop players for the future,” she adds. “That future isn’t yet defined, so we need to develop a breadth of skills – adaptability, robustness, resilience, as well as a range of technical and tactical skills – that will allow them to evolve towards that ultimate aim.”

3. Specialist coaches

Youth coaching requires specialists – it is not just a stepping stone to senior coaching. “Lots of systems now recognise the importance of that development coaching population being supported and developed themselves,” says MacNamara.

“The young athlete is a mixing bowl of inputs and outputs. They’re in school, they might be in an academy, they might be on a national pathway or at a club. So, in a way, coaching a developmental athlete is more complex than coaching an elite athlete; and the better a young athlete gets, the more people they accumulate.”

4. Equity not equality

An athlete’s priors, proximity to performance and temporality require adroit handling. “There’s almost like an orchestration from the coach’s perspective that’s recognising what the individual athlete needs at this moment in time and how to organise the environment to do that,” says MacNamara.

The coach needs to know how an athlete will respond to, say, entering a competition above their current capability, training with a new group, or being coached in a certain way. “There’s a triangulation of asking what is this athlete bringing into the environment? How do they cope with this? And, after reflection, what’s next? It’s almost like giving them the water wings to survive the turbulent thing that’s going to happen next.”

This, MacNamara suggests, is why the best environments offer equity rather than equality. “No one gets the same experience, but they get the type of experience that is required, that promotes their development at that time.”

5. Athlete agency is essential

Young athletes should be considered agents in their own development. “It’s pretty condescending to think on a pathway we’re just doing things to them,” says MacNamara.

She uses the example of an early maturer who suddenly finds themselves in a difficult academy environment. “Unless they understand why this feels uncomfortable and unless they’ve been given a toolbox of skills to be able to cope with that then retention on a pathway is going to be difficult because why would you stay if you didn’t know why what was happening was happening? High quality systems and environments integrate the athlete into their conversations and individual development plans.”

6. A shared mental model of development

The best way to ensure coaches, athletes and other staff are on the same page is alignment between three distinct curricula:

• The planned curriculum (the intentions, goals and structure of what coaches and the wider system intend to happen);
• The enacted curriculum (the behaviours, methods, activities and interactions that the coach delivers on the ground);
• The experienced curriculum (how the athlete perceives, interprets and responds to what is delivered).

“The alignment between the three is often broken because people don’t understand why what’s happening is happening,” says MacNamara.

“What we should be looking at is the experienced curriculum; what’s actually happening on the ground between different domains. So this idea of being interdisciplinary, not multidisciplinary. How do sports scientists, doctors, biomechanists, physiologists, coaches and other staff work together to ensure the experienced curriculum is what we intend it to be?”

7. Successfully managed expectations

Athlete experience is also shaped by how success is framed and celebrated. MacNamara jokes that she has spent her career warning about the perils of early athlete success, but there’s no inherent harm in an athlete winning early in their development providing it is interpreted correctly and fully understood by the athlete and their coach.

“Being successful is both a motivational and strategically useful outcome at a younger age” says MacNamara. “Pathways need to manage those social expectations and how that success is experienced by the athlete and the people around them.”

8. Equip athletes with psycho-behavioural skills

Generally, it is not social rewards but challenges that inspire growth. “When we look at those athletes that successfully navigate the pathway, often they have relative disadvantages early on,” says MacNamara. However, by the time they become a senior athlete, having faced a wealth of challenging experiences, they have acquired a range of developmental skills and mechanisms that have allowed them to progress through each stage of the pathway. “Those psycho-behavioural skills are part of a toolbox that allows them to cope with the inevitable ups and downs of development.”

By contrast, the early physical developer who has had access to high quality coaching and environments may steal a march on their peers, but if they lack those psycho-behavioural tools then there’s a risk, as MacNamara explains, that their early lustre will be exposed as “fool’s gold”.

9. Coaches that balance fluency and learning

Coaches must know how to balance their levels of challenge and support. MacNamara says: “Being able to slide that dial for different people in a session is a real hallmark of quality coaching. We don’t coach to the mean – we recognise the range of experiences that athletes are having at that time and adjust towards that. With young athletes, there’s often a tendency for us to do a lot for them, provide them with positive experiences, because we want them to be good, we want them to enjoy it, we want them to get that feeling, but we also should want to create desirable difficulties.”

In training, that might mean balancing the provision of fluency sessions, which are often fun and easy on the eye, with error-strewn learning sessions. Yet too often, onlookers rush to judgement on a disjointed learning session.

“I can’t judge whether that’s a good session unless I know what you’re trying to achieve. What’s your intention?” says MacNamara. “If you want the kids to look good, feel great and boost their confidence, then your fluency session is a good idea. If you said we’re dialling up the challenge tonight because we’re working on certain technical aspects or for a motivational intention then a messier learning session is a better idea. And it’s not just the session. The intention and debrief at the end are critical too.”

10. A continuous cycle of reviewing, debriefing and reflection

That debrief needs to occur at both a micro and macro level. “The coach does not just make decisions on a daily basis, they will be within a session,” says MacNamara. “It’s the reaction to what is happening in those day-to-day, minute to minute interactions of a coaching session, and a recognition that the environment is everything that happens to the athlete, and how they’re reacting to things.”

This goes hand in hand with regular reviews of systems, processes and athlete individual development plans. “Ten years is definitely a long time for a 13-year-old at the first stages of a pathway,” says MacNamara of the latter. “So actually reviewing plans is critically important, and integrating people into that review is key as well.”

What to read next

How Do you Track Resilience in Academy Football Players?

By Dr Benjamin Kelly

The 1996 Argentine Grand Prix is primarily remembered for two major incidents involving Pedro Diniz.

The Brazilian driver, in his Ligier, collided with Luca Badoer’s Forti, which flipped upside down and ended in the gravel trap.

After some confusion, the trackside marshals belatedly deployed the Safety Car to pick up the race leader, Williams’ Damon Hill.

Diniz managed to continue and made a pit stop as the Safety Car prepared to pull in. However, his Ligier burst into flames as he attempted to rejoin the race.

Both drivers were unhurt despite Badoer being forced to crawl from underneath his Forti unaided in the confusion; Diniz subsequently abandoned his ruined vehicle without assistance too.

At a distance of three decades, footage of the Safety Car, a Renault Clio – a 150bhp city runaround – leading Hill’s 700bhp Williams and Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari seems quaint.

The criticism that came the marshals’ way underlined how Safety Car deployment in the 1990s tended towards ad-hoc chaos. They were typically borrowed road cars, they improvised pace and there were no standardised rules.

Fast-forward to 2026 and we have Aston Martin and Mercedes Safety Cars bristling with telemetry and data links.

Yet while the machinery has evolved, the cognitive vulnerabilities exposed by Safety Car moments have not.

The real deficit remains: human decision-making under pressure still misfires.

The Safety Car bunches the field, resets race dynamics, and, critically, forces high-stakes strategy calls in seconds.

Data across more than 200 Grands Prix reveals a chilling pattern: 68% of Safety Car deployments trigger suboptimal decisions. This is not because teams lack talent or simulation power, but because of loss aversion (the behavioural bias where avoiding pain outweighs equivalent gains) distorts pit wall logic under yellow lights.

To underline the point, here are three F1 case studies in pressure-induced error.

1. Mercedes at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix: over-defensive pitting

When George Russell deputised for world champion Lewis Hamilton at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix following Hamilton’s positive test for Covid‑19, his remarkable performance should have produced a debut victory. Instead, a sequence of communication breakdowns, tyre mix‑ups, and late‑race chaos denied Russell the chequered flag.

A late‑race Safety Car is deployed following Jack Aitken’s spin at the final corner, which dislodges his Williams car’s front wing and leaves debris on the racing line.

Mercedes is presented with two choices:

1. Switch to softs (expected value: track position gain, tyre grip)
2. Stay out (avoid perceived risk of pitting, lock in position)

Mercedes reacts by calling in both Russell and his teammate Valtteri Bottas for an unplanned double‑stack pit stop. They feel the Safety Car creates the perfect opportunity to pit with minimal time loss and finish the race on fresh tyres.

However, a radio fault means Russell arrives and is mistakenly fitted with Bottas’ front tyres, which violates tyre allocation rules. The mistake in the pit lane is mechanical, but the decision to double‑stack at all reflects a deeper bias. Mercedes immediately realises the error and instruct Russell to pit again on the next lap.

As for Bottas, with no tyres ready, the Finn is sent back out on his old hard tyres after a long delay.

Russell plummets from P1 to P9 while Bottas eventually takes P8.

What happened? This was a classic case of loss aversion. Pit crews tend to fear losing track position more than they value tyre advantage; protecting a lead trumps expected value in the calculus. It echoes golf when a player decides to lay up short of a par-5 hazard, sacrificing birdie odds to avoid the potential pain of a bogey.

2. McLaren at the 2025 Qatar Grand Prix: anchored to plan A

McLaren, with Oscar Piastri on pole and his teammate, the aspiring world champion Lando Norris, in P3, enters the race expecting a two-stop strategy based on pre-race simulations.

On lap seven, a Safety Car is deploys after Sauber’s Nico Hülkenberg and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly collide.

As this new evidence emerges, the entire grid, with the exception of the McLarens and Haas’ Esteban Ocon, pits. Pitting makes sense due to the 25-lap maximum rule for tyres on the 57-lap Lusail track; two pits stops are mandatory for each driver in any case. Pitting on lap seven allows teams to complete the race with two clean 25‑lap stints. There is also the fact that pitting under the Safety Car massively reduces the time cost.

But McLaren is anchored to the pre-race model – they’ve committed mentally. They delay the stop. Their rivals undercut. Piastri and Norris miss out on the podium.

What happened? This was classic anchoring bias. New information (Safety Car, track evolution) is discounted because the original plan feels ‘safer’.

3. Drama at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix: authority collapses under dual pressure

Perhaps the most infamous in recent times, Mercedes’ Hamilton leads Red Bull’s Max Verstappen on old, hard tyres, at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. He is mathematically cruising to an eighth world title just as Williams’ Nicholas Latifi crashes and triggers the Safety Car.

Mercedes faces a choice: pit Hamilton for soft tyres (risky as he’d lose track position) or have him stay out (on old tyres, but his position would be protected).

They have Hamilton stay out. It is a reasonable decision under loss aversion – avoid the certain pain of dropping position – but Race Director Michael Masi, under torrential team radio pressure from both Red Bull’s Christian Horner (“You have to race!”) and Mercedes’ Toto Wolff (“No, Michael, no! That was so not right!”), makes a call that bends the regulations. He unlaps only selected cars (just the five placed between Hamilton and Verstappen rather than all eight as per the regulations), then restarts the race on the same lap rather than the following lap, which was the rule at the time.

Fresh-tyred Verstappen blasts past the disadvantaged Hamilton on turn one and claims both the chequered flag and the 2021 world championship. The FIA later cites “human error.”

What happened? Masi faced cognitive overload, from duelling authority figures (in this case team principals) and an ambiguous rulebook to live broadcast pressure and split-second timing. He defaulted to the heuristic that felt ‘right’ under duress: let the fastest car win, ignore procedural nuance. The regulatory error is the symptom; the bias is the disease.

Why this pattern repeats: Attentional Control Theory meets the pit wall

Attentional Control Theory (ACT) explains the mechanism at play: under stress, humans shift focus from task goals to threat appraisal. On the pit wall, that threat is losing track position. Mental bandwidth narrows. Working memory floods with:

• Rival gap telemetry
• Tyre temperature data
• Radio chatter (driver, strategist, team principal)
• Live crowd noise (in-person events amplify this)
• Time pressure (decisions in 5-15 seconds)

With capacity overloaded, crews revert to loss aversion heuristics i.e. ‘protect position at all costs’. While this worked in 1996 when Clios led the field safely, it fails in 2026 when marginal tyre advantage can swing a race. Compounding hits harder.

A defensive Safety Car call leaves you vulnerable to undercuts on the next lap. Hamilton’s stay-out in Abu Dhabi was reasonable in isolation but under two-car pressure (Masi plus both team principals) it triggered a regulatory cascade. One error amplifies into a second.

The business parallel: boardrooms defend rather than attack

Replace ‘pit wall’ with ‘C-suite’ and the pattern scales perfectly:

• Earnings surprise? Loss aversion triggers cost-cutting (defend margin) rather than investment in growth (chase upside).
• Market shock? Boards freeze, anchored to old strategies, ignoring new evidence.
• Merger vote under time pressure? Leadership reverts to ‘safe’ plays – familiar suppliers, incremental moves – over optimal choices.

A 2023 McKinsey study found that 64% of board decisions during crises were suboptimal not because of information gaps, but because of process breakdown under cognitive load. It is the same mechanism as the pit wall: stress narrows focus, heuristics override analysis.

The fix: process over heroics

Elite teams and organisations beat loss aversion by building process immunity. Red Bull’s mastery of 2024-25 Safety Car restarts wasn’t luck; it was systematic.

The Red Bull playbook (which any organisation can adopt):

• Pre-mortems on loss aversion: before race day ask: ‘What’s the overreactive play? Where might we over-defend?’ Document the bias risks explicitly. Through my work with investors such a discipline slashes the disposition effect (selling winners too soon and holding losing stocks too long).  Whilst nobody enjoys selling at a loss you can pat yourself on the back that you saw this coming and through reduced uncertainty can accept the crystallisation of a loss.
• Binary decision triggers: don’t ask ‘should we pit?’ (this invites overthinking). Ask ‘Is tyre life < 5 laps AND track position < 0.8s gap?’ If YES → pit. Binary logic bypasses cognitive overload.
• Red-teaming Safety Car calls: assign one strategist as permanent contrarian. Their job: challenge plan A under yellow flags, force a 30-second debate on alternatives. Pressure forces speed; structure forces quality.
• Decision journals: log every Safety Car call (pit/stay, timing, tyre choice), assumptions made, and outcome. Over 20-30 races, patterns emerge. Feedback loops tighten decision-making.

McKinsey teams using checklists and red-teaming cut high-stakes errors by 44%; aviation proved it scales to life-or-death; F1 proves it scales to titles.

The invisible opponent

The yellow lights flash. A crash freezes the pack. Your rivals have Mercedes power units and tyre warmers. You have a pit wall under cognitive fire and a rulebook with ambiguous clauses. The invisible opponent – loss aversion, anchoring, authority bias, compounded errors – costs more points than any gap in car performance.

From Renaults herding supercars in the mid-90s to Abu Dhabi’s 2021 title reversal, Safety Cars have revealed F1’s deepest truth: the fastest car loses when humans default to defence.

Spot the bias. Build the process. Accelerate through the pack.

Dr Benjamin Kelly advises investors and professional athletes on decision making strategies in high stakes environments. If you would like to speak to Benjamin about his work, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

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Even the Best Tennis Players in the World Are Worse When the Stakes Rise – and it’s Not Just Down to Random Variance or Bad Luck

Main Image: Thomas Eisenhuth/Getty Images

By John Portch

Football academies tend to prize resilience, but few can agree on a definition.

“Even within the same football academy we’ve seen staff have different views of what resilience is,” Ben Ashdown, a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology and Lead Researcher at Nottingham Trent University, tells the Leaders Performance Institute on Teams.

“They’ll say ‘resilience is a really important part of our philosophy but actually we don’t really know what it is, we don’t really know how to measure or assess it, we don’t really know how to track it’,” says Dr Mustafa Sarkar, who also joins the call. He is an Associate Professor of Sport and Performance Psychology at Nottingham Trent and Lead Supervisor of the research programme.

Together, alongside Dr Chris Saward, Dr Nathan Cobb, and Dr Julie Johnston at Nottingham Trent University, they are leading a research programme to identify behavioural indicators of resilience in English academy football and develop a resilience behaviours observational tool. As part of the research, they have worked with academy stakeholders including coaches, psychologists, scouts, and analysts. They are also conducting a season-long study at a Category One academy (Derby County Football Club).

Based on their research, they have found that resilience behaviours can be categorised under six themes:

At the end of this research programme, they hope to have developed a tool for sport psychologists and coaches primarily, with some benefit to analysts who might contribute to the tracking of these behaviours through video-based analysis.

Sarkar says: “We don’t necessarily see it as a tool for identifying talent. I think it would be more as a conversation-starter with a player for player development purposes.”

Resilience: a behavioural response

As the exploration, measurement, and assessment of resilience in sport has tended to rely on self-report alone, myths and misconceptions have emerged (such as resilience being related to endurance and the suppression of emotion), and there is a gap between what resilience truly entails and what practitioners witness on the pitch.

“Coaches and support staff are starting to recognise that both physical and mental rest are critical to sustained resilience over time,” says Sarkar who has spent time with academy stakeholders dispelling those myths and misconceptions. “Part of resilience is about helping individuals to develop their thought and emotional awareness. It is not about encouraging people to hide their emotions”.

Additionally, “resilience requires more nuanced (context-specific) language because a person’s resilience in relation to being injured might be quite different to their resilience in relation to a loss of form”.

The behavioural elements of resilience lay at the heart of their research programme.

“We see resilience as a behavioural response,” says Ashdown, “but, up till now, there hasn’t been any literature that has actually asked what do these behaviours ‘look like’? How do we observe them? I think our work, in a behavioural sense, gives us some directly observable, reliable and valid indicators of resilience in football.”

The appeal for coaches, psychologists, and analysts is clear. “They’ve really bought into this idea that we’ve got something to look for on the pitch, and if we can see it [resilience], then maybe we can then develop it and track it over time,” Ashdown continues.

Their initial 2025 study/paper identified 36 behaviours (across six themes mentioned above), which have since been refined to ten. “We retained at least one across the six themes, which is another indicator that they’re pretty reliable.”

These behaviours include: demonstrating supportive actions during pressure or adversity (support-focused behaviour); positive body language in response to stressors (emotion-focused behaviours); and regaining focus in the face of challenges (robust resilience behaviours).

How might coaches approach these behavioural themes in their resilience development work?

The Leaders Performance Institute asks Ashdown and Sarkar about each of the six themes and they give consideration to each in turn with the caveats that a) they should be viewed collectively in order to develop a holistic view of an athlete; and b) the data collection and analysis of their research programme remains ongoing.

1. Teammate support-focused resilience behaviours

When players support or encourage teammates in stressful moments, especially after mistakes.

Ashdown admits that the relational aspects of resilience are more significant than he initially thought. “At times I probably assumed resilience was an individual capacity that you developed almost by yourself without realising that social support (through your teammates) is really significant,” he says.

“Through the work of Ben and others we’re starting to find that resilience is very much relational,” says Sarkar. “The development of resilience is dependent on cultivating high quality relationships. The interesting bit about social support is that we’ve found that it’s not necessarily about getting social support, but it’s about the perception that that support is available to you. From a resilience perspective, the perception is more important than receiving the actual support itself.”

Ashdown then shares a story of academy training drills, at Derby County FC (work led by academy sport psychologist, Lyle Kirkham, and supported by Ashdown), where players had a “secret support partner”. “We tasked some players with, right, when your teammate experiences some adversity or stressor or when they’re under pressure, find ways of offering them support,” he says, adding that the process raised the players’ awareness of how they’re reacting, responding and interacting with their teammates.

2. Emotion-focused behaviours

When players attempt to regulate their own emotions when encountering pressure, errors or frustration.

While there isn’t yet the data to support a definitive conclusion that emotion-focused behaviours depend on age and phase, as Ashdown explains, “there’s so many points where the participants said ‘we would expect to see a different response from a 10-year-old than one of our under-18s’.”

Emotional maturity is sure to be a factor. He adds: “How these players react and respond to things, particularly at younger ages, it’s a lot more visible, whereas maybe the older players tend to try and disguise how they’re feeling.”

This is a behavioural theme where interdisciplinarity comes to the fore. “We’re working with performance analysts to try and identify these behaviours through video footage and I think we’ll end up with a bespoke set of behaviours based on the phase [foundation, U9-U11; youth development, U12-U16; professional development, U17-U23].”

3. Effort-focused behaviours

Displays of physical and psychological effort used to cope with setbacks, fatigue or demanding situations.

What does making an effort ‘look like’ in any sport? “There’s a danger of making assumptions because every player is different,” says Ashdown with reference to both physical and psychological indicators of effort. Their work has talked of pairing GPS data with observations but, as he admits, “this is where we need to be careful and cautious of not mislabelling players based on a perceived lack of effort and we must be aware of individual differences”.

For Sarkar, again, it is more about setting the terms for a player development conversation. He says: “You might come up with a resilience profile to say one player has got hypothetically high effort-focussed behaviours and lower teammate-focussed behaviours, but we see this observational tool more holistically across all six themes”.

4. Rebound resilience behaviours

These reflect a player’s ability to bounce back quickly after a mistake or negative event.

These need to be channelled. It is no good if a player makes a mistake and runs around like a headless chicken for the next 10 minutes and is sent off.

“One of the participants in our research mentioned that exact point in relation to effort-focused behaviours,” says Ashdown, before echoing Sarkar’s earlier reflections. “The most value in this behavioural approach is the opportunities that it creates for player-coach or player-psychologist reflection.” This, Sarkar suggests, could be a joint review of game video clips where the coach and/or psychologist says to the player ‘talk us through your thought process. What were you thinking and feeling at the time? How might you react and respond differently?’ or it a series of ‘what-if’ questions and scenarios. ‘What if this were to happen in the future? How would you react and respond?’

Sarkar adds that any intervention should be context-specific. “If a player has done that once are we then making an assumption that they’re doing that all the time – is this a one-off occurrence versus a pattern of occurrences? If it’s a one-off, like Ben said, then it’s probing that player about what they were thinking at that particular point in time. But we have to be careful that we’re not intervening based on a one-off versus a pattern.”

5. Robust resilience behaviours

The ability to maintain stable performance while under sustained pressure or after setbacks.

Ashdown and Sarkar make the point that robust resilience behaviours risk being conflated with youthful inconsistency – and all its causes – at academy level.

“One of the participants in our research said it’s not about consistency of performance but the consistency of behavioural responses to things. So performance will fluctuate but is there some consistency in the way they’re behaving, reacting and responding?” says Ashdown. “What some of the coaches are after is a flattening of the curve emotionally and the way the players are managing things on the pitch.”

Sarkar believes coaches may be able to use the resulting observational tool as a means of evaluating the efficacy of pressure training scenarios. “What are you, the coach, actually seeing in terms of their reactions, responses, certainly from a behaviours point of view, and as a result of that pressure training, are you actually seeing an increase in some of the resilience behaviours in relation to these themes?”

6. Learning-focused resilience behaviours

When players learn from mistakes and adapt their actions rather than repeating ineffective responses.

Pressure training also presents an opportunity for self-reflection and learning through its video component – this is the ultimate purpose of this resilience behaviours work. “If we’re aware of that, can we support them in navigating those more effectively when they’re inevitably going to come up on the pitch?” says Ashdown.

“We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience,” says Sarkar, paraphrasing the American educational reformer John Dewey. “Pressure training shouldn’t just be about putting people under pressure in training and then automatically assuming somehow that they’re going to develop their resilience to future situations?”

At Derby County, led by Kirkham and supported by Ashdown, they have also introduced a series of gamification principles in delivering education and feedback at the academy through a resilience behaviours lens. This includes FIFA-style cards for players, and a football-specific version of snakes & ladders to mirror the ups and downs of the academy journey.

The future of resilience tracking

When it comes to resilience, coaches are acting on intuition, which is valuable but ultimately has its limitations.

“We’re trying to make that process more objective and systematic; hence this is where the interdisciplinary piece comes in,” says Ashdown. “We wouldn’t expect coaches in the moment in the game to be thinking about necessarily tagging or noting these behaviours. We might ask the analyst, with support from the psychologist, to do live coding or tagging of these behaviours or retrospective tagging based on the recording. That would then lead to conversations with the players. With this work, there’s a big opportunity to bring together coaching, performance analysis, and psychology.”

Sarkar explains that they are using the behavioural data to create a resilience profile for players across the noted behaviours. “That gives you a holistic viewpoint,” he says. “A player might have higher team-focused resilience behaviours and slightly lower effort-focused resilience behaviours and a medium level of learning-focused resilience behaviours. So, it gives you a nice overall resilience profile of an individual.”

The hope is that their work will eventually provide an evidence-informed and objective approach to tracking resilience on the pitch.

“It can also then become part of the everyday conversation with multiple staff. So rather than just a conversation in relation to psychology, it’s a broader conversation about player development.”

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Playfulness and Resilience: How Ballet and Music Schools Link Them Together to Amplify Both

By John Portch

“When you think about player development and the modern-day athlete, what is it you’re experiencing, seeing, hearing? What do they want? What’s the feedback you’re receiving?”

With those questions ruminating in Leaders Performance Institute members’ minds, Luke Whitworth, our Sport Performance Team Lead, set the scene for a discussion of current trends in athlete development at youth level.

The group highlighted both trends and their attendant challenges, yet there was a sense that these also represent opportunities to refine how coaches and practitioners approach talent development.

These are the five main trends that stood out from the conversation, as well as some ideas that have served members well in their roles.

1. The provision of holistic development is a baseline expectation

“We’ve been growing when it comes to holistic development,” said a coach from a Middle Eastern academy, “not only the focus on the technical, tactical part, but also performance in the physical area, the psychological support, the educational programmes.”

It’s a situation that extends well beyond that region and it is not just the athletes but their parents who demand more rounded support.

“It is very important to be on the pitch with the players and in the dressing rooms, the lecture rooms, because it’s important to work directly with them and support them,” the coach added.

Opportunity

A psychologist based in the Australian system shared her approach:

“We have dedicated programmes and an evidence-based curriculum that teaches those skills of resilience, coping, receiving feedback and the soft skills.”

2. Earlier professionalisation

Young athletes in team sports increasingly come with their own performance entourage in tow – physios, S&Cs, psychologists – and it’s led a shift towards a “more professional mindset and approach”, as a coach based at a British university describes it.

“We’re now working in performance, not development,” said another. This expanded menu of support services is not a bad thing in isolation.

“From a coaching point of view, the influence they have on feedback that the player gives you is not necessarily aligned with what we’re trying to implement as coaches; and that can be frustrating,” said a coach at an AFL club.

Those influences include third parties, such as agents. “We actually have services that are professional organisations that just provide services for athletes who are on their way up and they cherry-pick them,” said a performance director of the Indian sporting landscape where he plies his trade. “They give them a psychologist, a physio, a strength & conditioning person and everything else they need as soon as they get a whiff that they might be talented.”

Opportunity

Compromise and clarity are essential, as the India-based performance director explained:

“As an academy we have to make agreements, establish roles and responsibilities, who should take care of this, who should take care of that, while we’re managing that professional approach.”

3. Many young people are priced out

As the price of attending both training and competitions year after year continues to rise, those from less affluent demographics are falling away.

“How can we get people who maybe can’t afford to get into these sports to stand in front of us?” said a head of youth coaching at a major English football club. “Our academy car park is amazing. It’s like a first-team car park. The days of kids coming on trains and buses to training have almost gone now.”

Opportunity

In Australia, some sporting bodies support and subsidise athletes; and if a child in a remote region requires online assistance to make it work, then that’s what they’ll receive. The aforementioned psychologist said:

“We’re very conscious of setting up a pathway that players can access equitably. We don’t charge to come on a talent camp… and we’ve just sent a player off for an MRI. We’ll pay for that. We pay for their accommodation and their food, which is probably not common across pathway sport or teenage sport in Australia.”

4. Changing athlete psychology and social needs

This is related to No 1. Today’s young athletes are often more technically skilled than previous generations, but they require more psycho-social and emotional support.

For one, young athletes today are more extrinsically motivated, as the head of youth coaching in English football observed.

“They really care about what people think of them, the perception piece, whether that’s social media, but they really care what people think about them. So being part of a group is quite important for them,” he said.

On that final point, the same scenario is playing out in Australia. “The one thing I’m sensing now is the expectation of a player that’s been at the club for a while or just coming in is that they feel connected to the environment,” said the AFL coach. “So if that doesn’t happen, we’re seeing more player movement than ever before.”

Opportunity

Players are taking more care in their choices rather than pledging blind loyalty to a club – and the smartest teams have noticed. “We’re actually seeing the greatest successes in terms of who wins the premiership or the championship from teams that do that well compared to ones that don’t,” he said before adding:

“The athlete is putting a lot of time into making decisions about their careers. I think we’ve got to step up in this space and not be walked over by the athlete, but understand what their motivations are and tailor it to the individual as much as anything. I know the social skill part is an ongoing challenge. I’ve already had older players come up to me and going ‘he’s not fitting in well socially’. So we’ve got to go to work on that.”

5. This all means that staff members must change

As the conversation neared its conclusion, Whitworth posed another pertinent question: “We’ve talked a lot about how the athlete is evolving, but in turn, how do we have to evolve as well? And what additional skills are we going to need?”

Communication, as ever, was high in the group’s thoughts. “Everyone’s gone digital first,” said a sports nutritionist based at a British university. “I probably do 80% of my work with athletes online.”

His colleague, a coach, concurred. “When there’s clarity then there’s clean execution from different disciplines. When it’s muddy, things don’t get done.”

Opportunity

The performance director based in India went further based on his experience:

“We have to become diplomats, high‑level development people who can manage such diverse groups. Somewhere along the line, we need to start creating those development opportunities for everybody who’s on this call.”

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Talent ID and Development: The Race to Deliver Formula 1’s First Female World Champion

By Dr Benjamin Kelly

It was one of the defining comebacks of 2025.

In the first round at Wimbledon Taylor Fritz trails two sets to love and is two points from defeat against record‑breaking server Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, whose 153mph serves had dominated early.

While serving at 5–1 in the fourth‑set tie‑break, Mpetshi Perricard blinks. The American claws back, steals the set, and goes on to win in five. The Frenchman’s collapse from a seemingly unassailable position is a vivid example of how even explosive servers falter when trying to protect a lead.

Across 650,000+ points from Grand Slam tournaments between 2016 and 2019, players facing high situational pressure – such as break points and match points – produce significantly more unforced errors and double faults than on routine points. Both eventual match winners and losers show the same pattern. Even the best players in the world are predictably worse when the stakes rise.

This is not random variance or bad luck. It is loss aversion in action. When a double fault risks handing over a break, servers tend to play more conservatively: they hit fewer aces and outright winners, but also commit fewer outright errors. Studies have shown that ace rates can drop by around 15–20% on break points compared with routine points, while double faults also decline. The same psychology drives safer second serves and more central returns under pressure. Players trade risk for safety at precisely the moment when controlled aggression would close the point most efficiently.

Elite tennis reveals decision making under uncertainty with brutal clarity. Every serve and return is a discrete decision with measurable consequences. Pressure points expose systematic decision biases that erode performance exactly when players can least afford it. Understanding these patterns gives coaches and captains tools to protect automatic execution and tilt the odds in high‑stakes moments.

Loss aversion on serve: trading winners for safety

In keeping with my recent articles on decision making within golf and football, Prospect Theory explains why servers often choke on break points. Losses – double faults, games and sets conceded – loom larger than equivalent gains like aces or outright winners. Facing break point, players do not simply fear the double fault; they over‑adjust by serving safer, reducing the risk of a catastrophic loss but also shrinking their margin for winning the point.

Analyses of Grand Slam matches show this clearly. On break points, players reduce double faults (a form of loss avoidance), but their ace rates and winner percentages fall significantly. Second‑serve accuracy may improve slightly under pressure, but the trade‑off is fewer aggressive first serves and fewer free points. Overall, servers win fewer high‑pressure points than their baseline serving statistics would predict.

The pattern mirrors golf’s par‑versus‑birdie putting gap, where professionals hole par putts more reliably than equivalent birdie putts, despite identical distances and conditions. In tennis, the reference point is holding serve. Routine points allow a more natural level of aggression; break points trigger defensive conservation, with players subconsciously prioritising avoiding a break over maximising the chance of holding.

This recent body work on high‑stakes tennis has explicitly tested loss aversion. When time pressure and competitive stakes are framed in terms of losses (for example, ‘do not get broken here’), players consistently adopt safer shot selection across the board. That behaviour can compound: one tentative service game invites more pressure in the next, increasing the frequency and intensity of high‑stress points.

Choking mechanisms: when pressure disrupts automaticity

Attentional Control Theory offers a useful framework for understanding why these patterns emerge. Skilled serving is largely automatic: years of practice have tuned complex sensorimotor routines that operate with minimal conscious control. Under pressure, that balance can be disrupted through two main routes: distraction and explicit.

Distraction occurs when worries about the score, the crowd, or the implications of losing a point clog working memory. Explicit monitoring occurs when players shift attention inward and try to consciously control normally automatic mechanics, such as toss height or arm speed. Both mechanisms interfere with fluid execution.

Grand Slam data shows that high‑pressure points are associated with more errors, and that prior errors increase the likelihood of further mistakes. A double fault or badly missed first serve raises anxiety, which can push a player toward more explicit monitoring on the next point. Unforced error rates rise when recent mistakes coincide with break points for both winners and losers. Experimental work on serving under pressure shows that second‑serve accuracy can degrade under these conditions, even in highly skilled players.

One practical solution is to train and cue external focus rather than internal mechanics. When players focus on an external target – such as ‘drive the ball through the back corner of the box’ – they tend to maintain accuracy and speed better under pressure than when they focus on their arm motion or toss. Coaches can replicate pressure in training by simulating break points, adding consequences for double faults, and insisting on external cues only.

Tactical biases and the momentum myth

Pressure does not only affect serving mechanics; it also distorts tactical choices. Confirmation bias can lead players to persist with patterns that worked earlier in the match – for example, repeatedly attacking with the forehand – even after the opponent has adjusted. High‑pressure points often make players cling more tightly to these familiar patterns, reducing tactical flexibility.

Hindsight bias then colours post‑match analysis. Players and coaches frequently reconstruct a contest around one or two ‘turning points’, such as a double fault in a tie‑break, and label them as decisive mistakes. In reality, work on pressure and compounded errors suggests these visible moments sit on top of a sequence of subtle shifts in attention, confidence, and tactical risk‑taking across many games.

The popular notion of ‘momentum’ is often a narrative laid over these processes. Apparent swings in momentum frequently reflect ordinary variability plus predictable pressure responses, rather than some independent force. Statistical work on break points shows that players’ conservative serving and shot selection under pressure is broadly similar across rounds and contexts, even if commentators frame later‑round points as uniquely special.

A toolkit for coaches and players

High‑performance tennis environments can counter these biases by deliberately adjusting how players train, frame, and review key moments:

• Serve reframing on big points

Reframe break‑point serves as opportunities to execute a pre‑agreed, high‑margin aggressive pattern rather than as mines to be tiptoed through. Track ace and winner rates by pressure level, not just overall hold percentage, to reveal overly defensive tendencies.

• Pressure inoculation in practice

Regularly simulate break points and game points in training, with modest but meaningful consequences for double faults or missed patterns. Require external focus cues only (‘aim at the back corner of the box’, ‘hit through the logo on their chest’) to protect automaticity under load

• Pre‑planned tactical options

Before matches, agree two or three ‘go‑to’ serve–first‑ball patterns for pressure points, so players are not improvising under stress. This limits the influence of confirmation bias in the moment and embeds flexibility into the plan.

• Structured debriefs  

Separate analysis of pressure points from routine points in post‑match reviews. Quantify how much serving behaviour changed on break points (ace rate, double faults, location patterns) instead of relying on memory and narrative. Use this as a basis for revised training goals rather than simply labelling moments as ‘chokes’.

Tennis exposes human decision‑making with nowhere to hide. Every point offers immediate feedback. Players who learn to master loss aversion, protect automaticity, and maintain tactical flexibility under pressure do not just win more; they reliably convert pressure into advantage. Coaches and leaders who design for these realities can build environments in which their athletes thrive when others falter.

At the margin between top‑10 and top‑50, these invisible patterns often make the difference. Surfacing and reshaping them in my opinion is one of the most powerful – and underused – edges available in the modern game.

Dr Benjamin Kelly advises investors and professional athletes on decision making strategies in high stakes environments. If you would like to speak to Benjamin about his work, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

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The Invisible Opponent: Why our Own Cognitive Biases May Present the Most Formidable Challenge

By Jamie Taylor

Most people in sports coaching have little interest in research.

Additionally, one of the key challenges in coaching is that there is a world of evidence that can help practice, but most do not know about it.

At Dublin City University we are trying to subvert that attitude through our online doctorate and MSc programmes, which are aimed specifically at coaches and practitioners in high performance sport.

We have a community of around 100 coaches and practitioners who appreciate the capacity for research to enhance both theirs and their organisation’s practice in ways that have long been transformational in, say, S&C or medical.

In many respects, coaching is a discipline apart, yet sports performance has long-been reliant on other domains to pick up and apply research. More research can and should be done.

Below, I explore – drawing on insights from students across the doctorate and MSc programmes – the common barriers in coaching, before making the case for evidence-informed research that can meaningfully support practice. The programmes are delivered by a team of practitioner-researchers, including Áine MacNamara, Dean Clark, Robin Taylor, Rosie Collins, Stephen Behan and myself.

The common barriers

As a coach, you should be weaving research into your practice – it should not be additional.

“Last Friday, we protected two hours for some internal professional development with a group of practitioners,” says Ian Costello, the General Manager of Munster Rugby. “There’s 20 reasons not to do it, but if it’s important, it’s protecting the time in your diary, no matter how busy you are.”

Ian believes the programme has opened up new career options, potentially even beyond professional rugby union. He has now got into the habit of writing in his diary in three colours: black for operational matters; green for strategic issues; and blue for learning and personal development.

“Someone gave me one of those multicoloured pens – I hate them because of my bad handwriting and these don’t help – but it’s brilliant for my diary,” he continues. “Learning and personal development can be anything from podcasts to light reading or heavy reading. It can be writing too – that was a good life skill and practical skill that a mentor shared with me.”

Additionally, coaches have not often been shown how to critically organise their thinking, even when they thought they were doing so.

Ian has been coaching for more than two decades, but still wouldn’t describe himself as the finished article.

“The first year broke me down in terms of questioning everything I know around critical thinking and reflective practice,” he says. “What the doctorate does is give you more structure to that process. It provides you with a more robust and applicable skillset to be accurate in research terms and then to think critically about the information you’re absorbing. As time goes on, you’re able to transfer that to your practice more readily and with a lot more clarity.”

He is not the only one to find the first year challenging. “It was quite confronting and shocking,” says Jamilon Mülders, the Performance Manager at the Royal Dutch Hockey Association. “You try to present where you’re coming from, what you have achieved, what you have done and why you have done things, and the staff at DCU will pose little questions like ‘where’s the evidence?’”

Jamilon has won Olympic and world championship medals as a coach, and yet, as he says, “I have to acknowledge that nine out of ten things we did worked for whatever reason at that stage, but there was no underlying theory, no evidence. There was nothing you could fall back on where you can explain it or also just make sure that you detect possible mistakes, issues, challenges, hurdles which might have happened or occurred in other areas.”

He sensed that something was absent. “I felt that something was missing in my personal education and growth,” he continues, further reflecting on that induction period at DCU.

Some coaches may never have set foot in an academic setting but, whether it’s our doctorate or MSc programme, we don’t need to simplify course material for coaches. We just need to make sure we are providing the right provocation.

“When we’re asked better questions it causes us to say ‘actually, I took that situation for granted, but I need to peel that back a little bit more’,” says Rachael Mulligan, the Athlete Support Manager at the Federation of Irish Sport. “It forces you to go ‘what is the best question to ask in order to get to a better outcome?’”

The most recent cohort of students on DCU’s professional doctorate and MSc programmes lines up for a group shot at DCU in Dublin.

The case for evidence-informed – not evidence-based – research

I hear all the time that ‘we need to quantify this’. It leads us to measure things that don’t really matter simply because we can count them.

There are different ways of seeing this and my view is that evidence should inform coaching, working alongside professional experience, theory, and context, rather than being treated as something on which coaching can be straightforwardly evidence-based.

“For anybody to be genuinely comfortable about their view of the world or their view on practice, it should be research-informed,” says Scott McNeill, the Head of Coach Development at the Premier League. “The risk and challenge of research is that sometimes things can go out of date very quickly. A body of research can be nearly out of date the day that it’s printed. So to keep that as a consistent and live way of engaging in practice would make sense to me, that suggestion that knowledge isn’t fixed, that these things keep evolving.”

“The first thing I said was my issue with research is I sometimes think researchers are almost in an ivory tower and very much removed from what goes on in the day-to-day field of performance sport,” says Rachael of the topic.

“That perception was completely quashed after a couple of weeks in the programme because there’s so much emphasis in terms of, yes, this is fantastic in the academia space, but how do we move this into real-life practice?”

“I used to always say I was evidence-based and a lot of coaches will pride themselves on that,” says Christoph Wyss, the Lead Physical Performance Coach at Red Bull. “But I think evidence-informed makes more sense because if a research paper comes out, being evidence-informed is taking that research, reading it, critiquing it, seeing what’s good and what’s not, and then applying that to your setting, because every setting is different.”

As he says, “with evidence-based you’re just transplanting it, doing exactly what they did, but then evidence-informed is more translating it.”

“There’s not necessarily one solution,” says Eilish Ward, the Head of Player Development at the Ladies Gaelic Football Association. “There’s no one way to learn anything or to gain experience or expertise.” The key for Eilish in her work is to ensure she and her colleagues are “making as informed decisions as possible when we’re designing learning activities” because “not everything from research may be transferable into a practical environment and, equally, every practical environment is going to be hugely different.”

“Being evidence-informed is probably more aligned with what we do on a day-to-day basis,” says Niall O’Regan, the Head of Education & Development at the Football Association of Ireland (FAI). “It is something that has helped me to understand how to be authentic, how to be creative in adapting what the research is saying is to suit the needs and the context and the environment that you’re in.”

Plus, as Scott says, “people sniff you out pretty quickly whenever there’s a gap between what you’re saying and what might feel real to them. Our job as people that work in this space is to either translate the messaging in a more accessible way or to admit that there probably still is a gap.”

And therein lies the opportunity to ask better questions.

Research should never be far from practice

While the programmes can be intimidating for coaches, we’re here to help in any way we can because it is important that research is not too far from practice. When they are close, the research finds practical application.

“This was a part I enjoyed from day one because you could immediately see the practical implications and make an impact,” says Jamilon of his coaching in field hockey. “So if I were talking with S&Cs about load management around our training, my new way of approaching them and asking questions really helped me to have a clearer view on the team and the environment.”

In some cases, research can help to highlight the current inadequacies in a high performance programme.

Niall, for one, thinks differently these days about coach development structures at the FAI; and it feeds into his practice.

“There are some experienced coaches that have so much knowledge and so much expertise in their fields that they may not need to go systematically through a certain set of steps,” he says. “They may have the ability to effectively communicate, empower others or share knowledge in a way which doesn’t require them to go through a checklist. They can get to the end with the exact same learning and sometimes even more learning.”

Such an approach doesn’t necessarily sit right with the coach and it wouldn’t necessarily sit right with the coach developer. “There’s a grappling effect where those people probably feel like, ‘well, I’m being rigidly pushed into a checklist of things and being asked to do things that I naturally wouldn’t do myself’.”

It comes back to being research-informed. “The person in front of you is the actual start point, and then it’s up to us as the educators and developers to be able to link it into research. The practice comes first and then it’s a matter of layering in what research is out there that can inform the decisions that that person is making.”

If you would like to know more about the professional doctorate and MSc programmes at DCU please email Jamie Taylor at:

[email protected]

By John Portch

When it comes to considering self-awareness as a leadership quality, Emma Keith is ambivalent.

“A lot of people hold up self-awareness as the holy grail. ‘I’m really self-aware.’ Brilliant. But it’s a complete waste of your time if you do nothing with that knowledge,” she said.

“Just imagine that I’m the kind of boss that says: ‘When I’m under pressure I can get really stressed and yell’ – I don’t think I am but let’s say that I am – it doesn’t help my team at all that I have that knowledge. What helps them is that I do something about that, which is the hard part.”

Keith, a Royal Air Force Group Captain, is the Commandant of the Tedder Academy of Leadership at the RAF. In 2015 she became the first woman to run RAF Officer Training.

A decade later, she stepped onto the stage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit to run through her organisation’s strategies for effective learning.

The Leaders Performance Institute picked five that stand out.

1. The RAF promotes self-leadership

For the RAF, learning is not just about “absorbing information”, as Keith put it, but in establishing the right habits that enable learning. Self-leadership is at the forefront of their approach. It combines that aforementioned self-awareness with self-management. It also feeds into the idea that everyone in the RAF is a leader in their own right.

“Leadership at all levels really matters,” said Keith, who believes it would be all too easy for personnel in non-command positions to absolve themselves of responsibility. “I really don’t like the term ‘follower’. It needs a word in front of it; an engaged follower, a respected or intelligent follower. Nobody just follows, or at least they shouldn’t, and I don’t want someone in my organisation who isn’t a thinking follower. What we’re really talking about is a leader who’s leading themselves with followership skills.”

Character is critical too. “You can teach skills more easily than you can teach character,” said Keith, who is less interested in what a person has done than how they have approached their opportunities.

“For example, if somebody has an amazing profile but they were dropped off at every fixture at school; they were picked up and everything was handed to them, it’s not to take it away from them but I want to see more from that person. But the kid who got on a bus and travelled 40 minutes under their own steam to make hockey practice – that shows me something about their character.”

Emma Keith in conversation with Alex Stacey at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Kia Oval in London.

2. The service positions its values as the ‘carrot’ rather than the ‘stick’

The RAF has a document entitled ‘Air Publication One’. “It’s not a very sexy name, I’m afraid,” said Keith. “Welcome to the military.”

Prosaic title aside, it sets out the RAF’s values of ‘respect’, ‘integrity’, ‘service’ and ‘excellence’. There’s nothing unique in those four – you probably have something similar within your teams – but the devil is in the detail.

Air Publication One is updated from time to time, with the last occasion being in 2019.

“Those updates covered more inclusive imagery and language,” Keith continued. “Thinking about my organisation, that’s probably not that surprising. But another major change that I made to that document, which came from my experience of running officer training, was to shift this from being the stick to the carrot.”

This shift was critical because too often the document was used to browbeat good people. “Actually 99% of my organisation are amazing, they really are, and I wanted a document that was aspirational for them, that they could believe in, that it was the organisation they wanted to be a part of. And we know from all the different behavioural models of change that it only happens when people want to change, not because it’s been forced on them.”

Everyone in the service is asked what these values mean to them. “Even the word ‘discipline’ means something different to me and a 17-year-old who’s just joined up. So, if they feel that they’ve been heard and listened and talked to, I think that’s really important.”

Air Publication One is currently undergoing further revision.

3. They use peer to peer storytelling

As Keith explained, she and her team produced an anthology and a series of videos detailing the stories of RAF personnel. These are not just nice-to-haves but critical learning resources.

She illustrated her point by referring to the ineffectiveness of a top-down approach with a recruit. “With the best will in the world, if I stand up there and tell them all the things they should do, they’re going to look at me and go, ‘thanks very much, Group Captain, you do not live my world, you do not know me and I’m going to switch off. Your lived reality is different to mine’.”

Instead, “if their corporal stands up and says it, someone who’s only a couple years ahead of them, that really is powerful. Who in your organisation can you help sell that message for you?”

4. They accept that learning never ends

The RAF used to approach leadership development for its aspiring officers as something to be taught in one hit. Today, the service adheres to a four-step pathway:

“We’re changing ‘lead teams’ to ‘lead others’ because not everybody has a team, but you lead by role model and example,” said Keith, who also highlighted the pathway’s non-linear nature. “The reality is you will be doing all of these things all of the time. The Chief of the Air Staff is still leading himself. You never stop that.”

She also encourages challenge from younger generations. “It’s about having humility on both sides to have those conversations. That’s where things like mentoring and reverse mentoring can be so powerful. It’s an exchange of ideas that can be so helpful. I mentor a lot of people and, honestly, every time I put the phone down or put the coffee cup down, I’ve learned as much as they have, if not more, I am absolutely sure.”

5. They leave the ‘how’ to their learners

Nestled at the heart of the RAF’s guiding principles is ‘mission command’, which refers to the empowerment of mission leaders.

“In simple terms this is the idea that the leader or whoever’s in charge of the task is set the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, but we really try and keep out of the ‘how’,” said Keith. “What you’re trying to give is as much freedom of manoeuvre for people on the ‘how’ as you can.”

If she needs a team to cross a river to rendezvous with someone on the other side, for example, she will let them decide the ‘how’ so that they are not reliant on returning to her for instruction should things go wrong.

“It allows a speed of decision-making, empowerment for that person. It operates on trust and it crucially frees up headspace for the person in charge. Another wonderful gift you get from that technique is innovation and creativity, because they will probably do things differently to you, which is potentially uncomfortable for you, but also probably helpful.”

More on effective learning strategies

‘If the Speed of Learning Isn’t Fast Enough, the Moment Is Gone.’ Five Challenges in Creating More Effective Learning Environments and their Potential Solutions

When it Comes to Learning, the Coach Must Create the Right Environment, But the Athlete Must Want to Step into it

By John Portch

The Leaders Performance Institute recently had the opportunity to listen as some of the finest head coaches in the world talked shop.

Curiously, the technical and tactical elements of their work did not make the agenda. Instead, they spoke of belonging, connection and the need to put the person above the performer.

Those insights led neatly to this Leaders Virtual Roundtable where heads of performance, department leads and sports scientists gathered to discuss the theme of holistic athlete development.

First, we asked the virtual room to reflect on how athlete development plans have evolved; what has grown in prominence and where there has been the most evolution. Then we asked the table what feedback they have received from athletes on what they want to see more of in their development plans.

Together, they unearthed six trends in athlete development, which we present as they were shared during the discussion.

1. Greater athlete co-ownership of development plans

Athlete individual development plans are increasingly co-crafted by athletes themselves, as several members told us:

“Athletes want to be involved in what the plans look like, how we set them, how they engage in getting better on a daily basis. They want to be more autonomous.”

“We give our athletes a lot more ownership around their development plans. They set their own goals, which they then discuss with the coaches.”

The trick, as some members have found, is positioning these development plans within the broader team environment. A sports scientist who works with college athletes in the US said:

“It’s about getting them to think outside of themselves and go, ‘Okay, what’s our common purpose as a team?’ If we can get them to connect to that purpose as quickly as possible, we’ll progress the team culture because it’s coming from the athletes themselves.”

2. The performance disciplines are converging in athlete development

This convergence is to be expected in a world of holistic development. As one member, a sports scientist at a Premier League club, said:

“We view it as transdisciplinary, where every discipline is affecting the other disciplines. We ask ourselves how are we coming up with these programmes together rather than in separate disciplines?”

They then explained how that might look in practice:

“We want the things that the technical and tactical coaches are asking on the field to align with the athlete’s physical development work… we can be in their individual technical or tactical meetings and understand what the coaches are looking for.”

Additionally, some teams rely upon their psychologists to facilitate their increasingly transdisciplinary approaches. This is an example from Major League baseball:

“At our team, the high performance staff have benefited from incorporating our performance psychology group. They have used DISC assessments with players and staff. They shared the results between all so that there can be a mutual understanding of how each person communicates, interacts with people, learns, takes and responds to feedback.”

3. There is an increasing emphasis on mental health and mental performance

The table was unanimous on the question of mental health and mental skills. Here are some representative observations:

“Whether it’s generational or societal, across our young athletes there’s definitely more emphasis on mental wellbeing and a recognition that the world that they’re preparing for is changing all the time.”

“Most questions posed by athletes seeking help are social, emotional or mental – not technical or tactical.”

“Mental health and the importance of athlete wellbeing & engagement have really been front and centre in our high-performance training environments.”

4. There is also a growing emphasis on ‘social wellbeing’

Social wellbeing derives from the strength of an athlete’s relationships with their coaches, peers and extended friend and family circles. The support such networks provide is critical, but far from a given, as a team manager from the sailing world explained:

“How can we get them away from their sport and give them space to develop that social part and also learn from each other’s experiences as well?”

One attendee, who works with adolescent athletes in the UK, said:

“We’re working with coaches, parents, athletes, and high-performance teams to understand what social wellbeing looks like. We also surveyed our athletes on the aspects of social wellbeing that are important to them. We asked: do they have a network of positive social support that can help them find balance? Do their national teammates have shared values that they all work together to attain? Can they rely on their teammates to support them during difficult times? Are they able to maintain healthy relationships while competing as a member of the team? And do they contribute to their community in meaningful ways?”

5. Development plans increasingly go beyond performance too

This is where the holistic nature of modern athlete development models goes beyond the technical, tactical and physical, because performance issues often have causes away from the sport. The table offered a selection of responses:

“Our development model combines not just character development, but emotional intelligence, academic support, and lifestyle and mentorship alongside the athlete’s sport.”

“We must develop young athletes as people first and give them a foundation of a well-rounded identity outside of who they are as an athlete. Everything of who they are and how they see themselves in many cases to that point in their life has been tied to their athletic performance.”

These elements are not always easy to measure:

“There is a drive for increased data, quantifiable outputs, and a linked performance gain. But we keep this ground and space for what we feel is a greater, longer-term benefit through creating that community, the social connection, and so on.”

“It really comes down to the expected value of helping athletes and coaches be the best they can be; creating the best environments, creating the best team dynamics, and developing the person as a whole.”

6. More flexible programming

A little flexibility goes a long way, but it takes effort and intent, as the sailing team manager said:

“We’re looking at how we can be more supportive by offering some flexibility around our training programme, so we can support our athletes with commitments that they’ve got beyond their sport. Academic studies is a big one.”

By John Portch

“In terms of feedback, we’re quite basic creatures,” said Simon Eastwood. “We will react and respond instinctively to what we perceive as threat or reward.”

As Eastwood, the Head of Leadership Skills at Management Futures, explained, the wrong word, tone, timing or even body language from a coach can trigger a negative reaction when giving an athlete feedback.

Every Leaders Performance Institute  member attending this virtual roundtable has been there; and Eastwood, as host of the session, began by posing this question:

When giving feedback, what do you notice that people say or do, or that perhaps you might have said or done, that can trigger a negative response?

Members at the table raised some familiar themes, including:

• Poorly-chosen words.
• A judgemental tone and lack of curiosity.
• A lack of context for the feedback; incorrect or vague information.
• Failure to separate the person and the performance.
• When it’s driven by emotion (or, conversely, cold and detached).
• Poor timing.

Switching tack, Eastwood posed a second question:

What types of feedback help people to improve both quickly and positively?

The table suggested feedback that is:

• Supportive, non-judgemental.
• Respectful (perhaps the giver seeks permission first).
• Frequent and fast.
• Rooted in positive intent.
• Specific and evidence-based.

To help the members at the table strike that balance, Eastwood introduced them to the SCARF model.

The SCARF model

This framework, devised by neuroscientist David Rock, explains five domains that influence human social behaviour and motivation. SCARF stands for:

1. Status – our relative importance compared to others.
2. Certainty – our ability to predict the future.
3. Autonomy – our sense of control over events.
4. Relatedness – our sense of safety and connection with others.
5. Fairness – our perception that exchanges are fair and equitable.

“It’s a great tool for stepping back and assessing your team and thinking about what really makes them tick,” said Eastwood. “Crucially, it’s not about avoiding that feedback.”

He suggested that leaders should reward these needs through feedback, so people feel valued and motivated rather than threatened and, to illustrate his point, presented a table that set out what ‘threat’ and ‘reward’ may look like in each domain:

Eastwood then pivoted to his next question:

When giving positive feedback, which elements do you find most need to be reinforced?

The table responded across each domain:

Status

• “I am working with a couple of inexperienced analysts, so I’m conscious to praise them in public; addressing their status to build their confidence.”
• “Some of my team want acknowledgement and respect for their work.”

Certainty

• “People are looking for certainty because if you lose games, your job is on the line.”

Autonomy

• “Athletes who desire a sense of autonomy can be triggered by picky feedback and micromanagement.”

Relatedness

• “Some of my team are very strong on relationships. They really like me to notice or acknowledge the way that they support others or work in a team.”

Fairness

• “I know that I can be very easily triggered by what I might see as a lack of fairness.”

The Feedforward model

Eastwood then moved the conversation on to what leaders can do to help individuals improve future performance rather than dwell on past mistakes.

To that end, he introduced the table to executive coach Marshall Goldsmith’s Feedforward model.

While Eastwood admitted the term “can feel a little bit contrived as a title”, he feels it enables productive feedback conversations by placing the emphasis on the future:

As Eastwood explained, conversations that feedforward:

1. Move the focus from blame to growth:

Eastwood: “It doesn’t mean that you don’t address something that needs to be changed or improved, but it just means that rather than focus on what’s not gone well, you focus on what could go well next time.”

On the SCARF model: this means reduced risk of triggering status or fairness threats by avoiding blame.

2. Create autonomy and choice

Eastwood: “Instead of spending time looking back, the idea here is: how could you hold your position next time and still maintain the athlete-coach relationship?”

On the SCARF model: this supports athlete autonomy by inviting them to co-design solutions.

3. Encourage psychological safety

Eastwood: “It feels less threatening because it offers a range of possibilities. So you’re not really addressing what they’re not doing well, it’s just what they could do in the future.”

On the SCARF model: this reduces certainty and status threats by framing feedback as future-focused and constructive.

4. Work well for high performers

Eastwood: “They’re possibly looking out for more and asking ‘how I can be even better?’”

On the SCARF model: this taps into status and relatedness as motivating forces.

5. Promote conversation

Eastwood: “It comes across more of a coaching opportunity, and it has to develop focus, which shows care rather than telling off.”

On the SCARF model: it places an emphasis on relatedness and fairness.

Eastwood then posed a final question to the table:

The next time you give feedback, what will you do better?

Attendees provided a range of responses:

“I think I will ask my team to think about the way they would like to receive feedback as individuals.”

“Improve the speed at which we provide feedback. Do it more regularly and get to it quicker.”

“I want to encourage to speak to our coaches to think about these two models because they struggle to give good feedback to our young athletes.”

“I want to hold group feedback sessions where you present something you want to get feedback on.”

“With the athlete’s input, we can create a more individualised starting point that makes sense to them.”

To wrap things up, Eastwood suggested that attendees start making changes within seven days. He said: “They’re easy to have as a theory and they stay a theory until you actually actively use them.”

By John Portch

“From assessing the mental models inside the sport or the system, you can tell if it is a learning organisation or not.”

So says a coach developer who has worked across the North American, European and Australasian systems during their career.

“Even how they conduct performance reviews, induct, exit – all of that tells you about their speed of learning.”

When we asked the sports performance community to speak to us about the factors that affect the quality of leadership in their organisations, the most common answer was ‘learning & development’.

Its prevalence as a topic in our Trend Report has obvious roots: the speed of learning, as this coach developer put it, can enable you to outthink your otherwise well-matched peers.

Last week, Rachel Vickery, a high-performance specialist helping teams in the worlds of sport, business and the military perform under pressure, led a virtual roundtable entitled ‘How are we making learning effective?’

The importance of the environment came up time and again, as did the athlete-coach relationship and coach education practices. The group also spoke about AI’s role in learning.

Here, we outline five common challenges and run through a list of potential solutions.

1. When the front office and coach are on different wavelengths

“I asked coaches in my community of practice to bring their current work frustrations. I expected a percentage of challenges and opportunities related to athletes but, without exception, every single frustration was system-related or management-related.”

This head coach, with extensive experience of team sports in Australia, perfectly captures the common misalignment between coaches and senior management. Often when it comes to learning – be it coach development or athlete-facing – everyone has different expectations and, therefore, support can be found wanting.

“We see it all the time in complex sporting environments: the overabundance of surveillance and support in the athlete community,” said one member of their experience working in the US Olympic and Paralympic system. “But if we were to look at that as being applied to the coach, we would very rarely see a similar level of support structure around them.”

Potential solutions:

• Stop thinking about competencies and start thinking about the demands of the coaching environment – you can only aid a coach’s development if you’re addressing their real-life challenges.
• Front office workshops. For some teams, voluntary workshops that teach non-performance staff how to work with coaches have been oversubscribed, such is their popularity and the perceived need.
• IDPs for executives? This suggestion won’t be for all organisations but could work in smaller, startup-like environments.

2. Learning does not always stick nor is it always relevant

“Coaching moments are critical. If the speed of learning isn’t fast enough, the moment is gone.”

These are the words of a coach developer who has worked across the globe and witnessed different ideas of how people learn. Coaches tend to prefer organic learning over structured IDPs, which is often at odds with the “business minds” in the front office. “Communicating up is definitely a different language than communicating with our coaches,” said a coach developer working in US baseball. “The language of our coaches is non-linear. They want their learning to be organic and they want a relationship with the coach developer.”

And it is not just coach development. Some teams are overwhelmed by data that doesn’t help them to answer key questions. Without that ability to parse the data for insights, it is difficult to learn.

Potential solutions:

• There must be space for both formal and informal learning. “The informal makes it happen,” said the coach developer above. “The formal means you can track change and pay attention to history.”
• Clarify your problems, implement your solutions and learn from the outcomes. This coach developer also devised a ‘speed of learning’ model based on these principles.
• Use tech tools, such as GoPro or microphones. “The coach has been able to reflect and go, ‘I didn’t notice that cue from an athlete’,” said a high performance manager who has witnessed the use of GoPro in Australian rules football.

3. The enduring generational gap between athletes and their coaches

“I feel like in elite sport, we’re so far behind modern pedagogy in high school environments. Coaches are struggling with getting their ideas across.”

It’s a line that says it all when it comes to the learning of younger athletes. It has an attendant impact on coach development. “Coaches are just not developing the way that we think they should at the rate that they should,” said the aforementioned high performance manager.

Potential solutions:

• Meet athletes where they’re at. Literally. It could be the training pitch, the dining room, other communal areas.
• Provide online learning modules. These are easily accessible anywhere, anytime – perfect for the ‘YouTube generation’.
• Use TikTok, Instagram etc. Short and snappy wins the day for coaches willing to step away from the traditional.
• Use older athletes as role models. They’ve been there, done that, and younger athletes will listen.
• Try to gamify performance. Let athletes see their data, let them challenge themselves and, if appropriate, enable them to compete with their peers.
• Promote athlete agency. One coach developer based in the US endorsed an athlete-led TEDx-style series.
• Trial shorter meetings. Reduce an hour-long session to 30 minutes; and make sure those sessions are interactive.

4. The limitations of current AI models

“AI should be used to support the growth and creativity of staff as opposed to being used for shortcuts where people become lazy.”

This is an issue that likely warrants its own roundtable discussion.

Overreliance on AI, as this coach pointed out above, can stifle creativity. The table also highlighted the shortcomings of current large language models:

• The difficulty of transcribing and analysing multi-speaker environments where current AI tools struggle for accuracy.
• Intellectual property protection can be lacking, while it can be hard to choose the appropriate platform for a specific task.
• The inherent biases in AI-generated results.

Potential solutions:

• Establish clear parameters, regardless of what platform you use. This is fundamental to a good outcome.
• Crosscheck across two or more platforms. “Take that conversation and throw it into another AI tool – you are now responsible for creating that intellectual tension,” as one coach said.
• Ask the AI engine to provide three to five counterarguments. Don’t accept the first answer at face value.
• Ask the AI engine to keep track of patterns over time. “This,” as one coach put it, “eliminates a lot of the fluff”.

5. Confusion in coach development practices

“A coach developer is a curriculum director, a teacher, a consultant. But I don’t think there’s been a standard that’s been applied that captures all of the different ways in which the coach developer works.”

The issue described by this high performance manager illustrates how complex the role the coach developer has become. “On the top of them are the organisational goals and desires, and on the bottom the coach’s individual disposition,” they added.

Potential solutions:

• Map the demands of the role prior to the development programme. “Sometimes the learning is separate to the demands of the environment,” said a coach developer currently based in the New Zealand system.
• Provide clear job descriptions for coach developers. Of the balanced needs of the organisation and the individual, the high performance manager above said: “It’s up to the coach developer to determine the learning strategies that we’re going to deploy to help this individual coach navigate the complexity of those two environments.”
• But also be aware of the developing coaching landscape. Few insights illustrate the complexity of coach development as well as this observation from the coach developer working in baseball. “The role diversifies as the relationships increase,” they said. “Coach developers want it to be organic, and they want the relationship.”

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