Ben Ashdown and Mustafa Sarkar of Nottingham Trent University are working on a research programme aimed at providing an evidence-informed and objective approach to tracking resilience on the pitch.
Main Image: Thomas Eisenhuth/Getty Images
“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.
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.
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].”
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”.
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.”
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?”
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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As Jamie Taylor of Dublin City University and the CoEx|Lab explains, the university’s master’s and doctorate programmes are designed to help coaches and other high-performance practitioners embed research into their daily practice – a habit that is sometimes overlooked in sport.
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:
Group Captain Emma Keith took to the stage to outline the RAF’s ever-adapting approach to bringing trainee officers up to speed.
“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
In a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable, Simon Eastwood of Management Futures presented a series of models and tips for leaders in sport.
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:
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:
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:
“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
Certainty
Autonomy
Relatedness
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Toby Purser of the Royal College of Music discusses both elements of his work at April’s Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey.
British conductor Toby Purser also serves as Head of Conducting at the Royal College of Music [RCM], which makes him an educator too.
“There’s always an element in conducting of being a trainer because you are literally coaching the orchestra in what it is you want musically,” says Purser from the stage of the Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall at the RCM in London.
The question of teaching vs coaching in youth contexts comes up time and again during the day’s programme at Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey.
There is a subtle distinction, which was succinctly expressed by Eric Reveno, the Associate Head Men’s Basketball Coach at Stanford University, in words that resonated this week on LinkedIn.
‘A teacher is responsible for making sure you know what to do,’ he wrote. ‘A coach is responsible for making sure you do it.’
In musical terms, the conductor creates the environment for musicians to perform. “It isn’t just about dictating,” adds Purser. “It’s about being open, listening, and knowing how to process the information you hear reflected back at you.”
A performance will succeed or fail based on how well the conductor “adapts what you do to the way your ensemble is understanding you”.
A good conductor must have a strong feeling or vision but “be open enough to allow people around you to be individual, to have their own personality, to have their own talent on show for the audience. The more empowered an orchestra feels, the better the final result.”
Here, we look at both elements of Purser’s work in turn.
The conductor as coach
Purser’s expert musical ear is similar to a coach’s tactical intuition. He has a vision for the music and, if the violins in an orchestra are playing the same thing but not in the same way, he must act. It starts with a ‘feeling’ – you need to know who is right and who is wrong – and it ends with the musicians making the correction.
“Your job a little bit like a doctor in a way, you have to evaluate what’s wrong with this body,” he says. “Sometimes the reason some people can’t hear each other is because of the acoustics or it might be because of the way they’re sitting.”
Rather than “go back to basics” – professional orchestras don’t require technical instruction – “what you are primarily doing is enabling them to know how to listen to each other and also when to step forward into the limelight.”
This must stem from the conductor’s vision. “If everyone in the orchestra just played what was on their page it would be awful, noisy and unbalanced. The trumpets would be too loud – they’re too loud anyway! – you also wouldn’t have any kind of leadership or musical direction behind it. Just a series of notes that didn’t hang together.
“So as a conductor, you’re trying to explain to an orchestra in the easiest way possible what the intention is behind the music. And the intention is not only the big emotional idea, but the person you need to listen to and accompany at any particular moment.
“I would say 90% of your work as a conductor is getting that balance right.”
And in delivering the remedy, less is always more. There are even some elements that he will leave musicians to correct on their own. “If something goes wrong in a performance you need to do less,” says Purser. “The worst mistake you can make is to suddenly conduct really big and with huge energy thinking that you’re going to bring it back by throwing yourself around. When you leap around, you kick energy in all directions and it becomes unclear. Like ripples in water. If you drop too many stones in all you can see is waves when you want something really clear.”
There is also a psychological element. “You can feel the room,” says Purser of rehearsals. “Is the orchestra in the mood for the sort of things you want to work on or is it better to wait for later?”
He must trust his instincts. One time that meant losing his temper one time, in Russia, when he snapped after two days of being “very English, polite and collegial”.
“Oh, maestro,” said the suddenly impressed concert master (the first violinist) at the outburst, “we just needed you to pull your weight.”
“It was just the case that the orchestra needed somebody to be a bit of a tyrant in order to get the result, which means you have to go against your own nature because you have to give the orchestra what they need.”
The conductor as teacher
Purser explains that truly great conductors have an innate qualities, which is why just two students are admitted to the RCM’s conductors’ master’s course each year (although 150 students take conducting as a secondary study).
He says: “What we’re looking for is not so much that somebody comes in and conducts the best Beethoven symphony we’ve ever heard, it’s more about seeing that magic thing which is sometimes a conductor changes the sound of an orchestra without saying anything”.
The RCM can work on a student conductor’s taste, but it’s almost impossible to put into them the “spark of genius”.
Purser will work to identify if the student candidate has the right attributes by asking probing questions that force them to dig deep. “This is something you have to be psychologically sensitive about,” he continues. “Sometimes you need to get into somebody’s personal space to force something out of them.”
Conducting is, Purser estimates, “90% in the head”. “You spend your time at your desk reading notes and building a mental image. Transferring that from the brain to something more physical and passionate can be a big leap for some students.
“You need to encourage them, as soon as they’re in front of an orchestra, to let go of the brain.”
The reasons are practical too. “If you lead with your feelings you can make a quicker decision than if you go through all the pros and cons in your head first.”
The RCM approach in general is to “help people have confidence in their opinions and ideas and be able to express them.”
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