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By Luke Whitworth

Half of the practitioners at elite sports organisations believe there is limited integration between their data analysis and coaching teams.

That is according to a straw poll of attendees at a recent Virtual Roundtable hosted by the British Association of Sport & Exercise Sciences [BASES] and the Leaders Performance Institute.

The perception is worse when it comes to analysis and recruitment, with over 60 per cent of attendees suggesting that their analytics and recruitment teams do not work closely at all.

Yet 63 per cent also believe that improved data and computer literacy across their staffs would directly impact performance.

The sense that there is room for improvement gave the session its title: ‘Mobilising Performance Analysis in Practice’. It was the second in our three-part collaboration with BASES called Advances in Performance Analysis and centred around two case studies.

The first was delivered by Julia Wells, the Head of Performance Analysis at the UK Sports Institute [UKSI], and the second by Mat Pearson, the Head of Performance Insights & Data Strategy at English Premier League side Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Five areas where data literacy can improve performance

Before Wells and Pearson delivered their insights, attendees were set a further task: ‘as a consequence of improving data or computer literacy, describe what you would see as being the most significant impact on performance’.

The responses were varied but five stood out:

1. Improved efficiency: save time and, with that time-saving ability, you have more space to explore and analyse the insights to then act upon them. Similarly, greater efficiency means less education on metrics and processes for those who don’t have expertise in the area. Finally, there will be fewer mistakes.
2. Better accuracy: this leads to better decisions, thus allowing one to be more evidence-based in wider decision-making.
3. Observing trends over time: if done well, this leads to more engagement from coaches and athletes in the process and allows for data trends to be seen over a longer period of time.
4. More evidence-based decisions: an ability to create general reports at user level with an ability to drill down and ask more specific and sophisticated questions of data.
5. Easier benchmarking: there is room for more programme guidance and testing if things are working. It leads to more objective-based player assessments rather than just the subjective.

How the UKSI are mobilising performance analysis work-ons in meeting common challenges in data analysis

The first session highlighted the four biggest challenges facing people who use data analysis in sport. To kick off her presentation in the second, Wells explained how the UKSI is trying to tackle those four challenges (plus another).

Challenge 1: integration

Go back to basics. That’s the approach of the UKSI, who have placed an emphasis skill development, support structures and a clear data strategy.

It goes like this: the relevant staff members are upskilled in areas such as collecting the right data, using the correct formats in the right places before the interrogation and analysis even begins. This is then supported by a clear data strategy geared towards performance planning. For example, roles such as the data & insight lead and the performance data lead are embedded within the organisation to better help those leading programmes with the direction and the integration of their data. Thus, the strategy can come to the fore and everyone can better understand what needs collating and why within the team.

Challenge 2: data collation

Wells described how easy it can be to stay on the “hamster wheel” of collecting data without taking the time to critically reflect and pause. Can you, for example, call upon efficient processes for collecting data and wade through the myriad datasets potentially available? She recommended asking “quality questions”: why are we creating the data, what is its purpose, what decisions is it informing, particularly in the coaching process? Teams should do this periodically and continue to plan, do and review. Wells also encouraged engaging in conversations with key leaders in the environment to discuss what to start, continue and stop. It’s important to intentionally carve out those opportunities as part of your performance planning.

Challenge 3: communicating data insights

Wells stressed the critical nature of human engagement in the process and regards communication is a highly technical skill, despite the views of those who might see it as a ‘soft’ skill.

She shared that the different performance departments within the UKSI work closely with the psychology team to help elevate understanding of self and others. Wells said, if we can better understand the people we work with, it will support how people can get the best out of each other.  As part of this process, they’ve tapped into better understanding one another’s preferences in order to be more impactful in how they support each other.

Challenge 4: buy-in

It is not uncommon for senior stakeholders to not perceive the value of the work being done. This makes it incumbent on analysts to critically assess their impact and share the meaningfulness of their work. “It’s our job, and it’s our role to be critically analysing why and presenting that back,” as Wells said.

On that note, alignment to the sport’s strategy helps to provide a clearer connection. If this alignment and connection isn’t there, you’ll naturally get disconnection so it will be more challenging to get the buy-in.

In addition, relationships are just as critical when generating buy-in. Wells advocated inviting leaders and key stakeholders into your world and shadowing them. When they immerse themselves in better understanding the process you’ll find that it can quickly lead to them becoming a voice for you in wider conversations.

Challenge 5: data illiteracy

Too often, practitioners can suffer in silence when looking for solutions. In the latest Olympic and Paralympic cycles, Wells and her colleagues are seeking to increase data literacy across the board. They have introduced an internal online data community that provides access to resources, promotes connection, and leads to the sharing of good practice.

Wells’ team also put together a ‘Data Leadership Programme’ which is focused on pulling together the data leaders in the various sports with whom the UKSI work to look at opportunities, challenges and future direction. Courses, with titles including ‘Data Camp’, ‘Project Automate’ and ‘Code School’, were created to improve skills and processes for coaches and practitioners to help them be more efficient. In her mind, this has been crucial to enable people to be upskilled; and all support staff should be able to ask a good question and have the data skills to answer them.

How data analysis is supporting coaching and recruitment at Wolves

Pearson explained that he and his colleagues at Wolves are trying to align the club to ensure there is consistent evidence available and better identification of the trends impacting decision making from a data point of view.

He focused on two key areas: coaching and recruitment.

1. The integration of data analysis with the coaching process

In the environment, the analysts are part of the multidisciplinary team. They are very much now voices in the room and, with it being a specialised discipline, all analysts must have an impact on decision making.

To that end, Pearson’s team have moved away from leaving the coaches to find the solutions themselves. Instead, analysts are encouraged to go and find solutions, present them to the coach, and then have good conversations to better find the optimal outcome.

Part of the challenge we can face, said Pearson, in particular with performance analysis at first-team level in professional football, is that many environments can be quite coach-led, which is in keeping with the nature of short tenures. The coaches will lean into their viewpoint as a way to exert their control. Therefore, education is important and, in particular, how you communicate with them to ensure the message lands. That said, Pearson observed that coaches in modern day football are more attuned to data and performance analysis and are much more data literate and comfortable with technology.

A key learning when integrating performance analysis and data work with coaching is to make insights as contextual as possible. If you provide insights to a coach that are out of context, you’ll lose them straight away.

2. How data can support the game model, recruitment and selection

Pearson told attendees that some of the biggest strides in performance analysis and the wider data team have been in the field of game modelling, recruitment and selection decisions, with the obvious caveat that subjective input is still valued immensely.

The team have worked to create objective measures against the game model. In better understanding this, it has provided an additional layer of information related to individual player requirements for the game model. These insights are helping to inform both selection for matchday but also the recruitment of new talent. When thinking about the recruitment process in particular, Pearson said this process has helped to educate scouts and other recruitment personnel in the attributes for which they should be looking.

Visuals have played a key role in this process too, particularly in being able to show what it looks like to play in this particular style that the coach or manager wants. They’ve worked to make the playing style more objective.

By John Portch

There are echoes of coaching eras past in the way Adrian Blake Mitchell describes his ballet schooling at St Petersburg’s renowned Vaganova Academy.

“My teacher was extremely intimidating and that’s how he got good work out of us,” he told an audience at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull.

Mitchell teaches at the highly regarded Westside Ballet School, which is just across the road from Red Bull on Stewart Street in Santa Monica.

“Our training approach is really very much about fostering their love of the art form,” he continued. Rather than teaching from fear or intimidation, this “results in better artists, kinder and healthier people at the end of it”.

Those words chimed with Leaders Performance Institute members at the summit, where Mitchell spoke alongside Eileen Strempel, the Inaugural Dean at the prestigious Herb Alpert School of Music, at UCLA.

Here, we pick out four lessons in how the performing arts nurture their young talent.

1. The teachers must engender a sense of playfulness in students

If a love of art is essential, then it follows that the teacher – or coach – has to fit the bill just as much as any prospective student. “We’re also hiring teachers and thinking about the ecosystem,” said Strempel. The Herb Alpert offers a range of courses from musicology and ethnomusicology to composition and conducting. “What energies are those faculty bringing into our school?” She explained her belief that a love of art stems from playfulness. “We don’t actually talk about ‘working’ in music – we play music – and retaining that sense of play is absolutely integral.” The key is to foster an environment where the students are “playing with and inspired by each other”.

2. Individual development is about finding ‘other ways to win’

Ballet and music, much like sport, are ensemble activities and the risk is that the development of the individual can be overlooked. The Westside and Herb Alpert counter this by surfacing a student’s intrinsic motivation. Strempel said: “The solution to a problem might be X or Y, but we try to bring more profound questions such as ‘what is this piece of music about? What am I trying to convey? What am I bringing to this piece as an artist?’”

It speaks to what Mitchell called “winning in other ways”. He said: “This ties into the idea of improvisation and allowing us to experiment and find different moments in our work that can create success.”

3. They provoke failure

From the coach’s perspective, individual progress is about trying to develop solution-minded individuals who can adapt, adjust and improvise on the fly. This can lead to increased rates of failure, which the Westside readily accepts. “Sometimes when I’m really pushing my students we will repeat a variation three or four times without a break; no corrections,” said Mitchell. It provokes a level of fatigue akin to a performance but in a lower-stakes setting. “It’s important for that experience to be out of the way for them.”

At the Herb Alpert, teachers might introduce violin students to one of the two Stradivarius violins in their possession. Such is the difference in sound, colour, breadth and depth that it takes even an accomplished player six months to get to grips with the vintage instrument. Or if a student has been practising in the western symphonic orchestral tradition the school might introduce them to the completely different world of Afro Latin jazz. “The challenge is finding ways to expand the range of possibilities that allows an individual to extend themselves,” said Strempel.

4. They connect that failure with motivation and resilience

The Herb Alpert’s approach to creating a caring and nurturing environment does much to foster resilience but, as Strempel explained, it also comes back to a student’s intrinsic motivation. “If you keep it on the level of ‘I just want a great performance’ or ‘I just want to win the game’ that leaves so much creative potential on the table,” she said, being sure to include a sporting analogy. “You have to tap into intrinsic motivation to do that right, whether it’s because you want to give back to your community or because you’ve got something you want to say. It’s not about being a better musician, dancer or athlete but being a better human being”.

By John Portch

Few people, if any, have a definitive answer when it comes to the role of psychosocial skills in talent development.

Nevertheless, the Leaders Performance Institute decided to raise the topic with two distinguished individuals: Kit Wise, the Dean of the School of Art, Design and Social Context at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology [RMIT], and Budi Miller, the Co-Artistic Director at the Melbourne-based Theatre of Others.

Both took to the stage at Melbourne’s Glasshouse in February to discuss their approaches to talent development as well as managing challenges as they emerge.

Here, we explore Wise’s work with art and design students at RMIT, where he readily admits his role is to “damage their minds just enough”.

Inspiration, aspiration, expectation

Wise’s philosophy of talent development in art and design is configured to help students further develop mental and social skills such as cognitive reframing, goal-setting, self-talk, and the coping skills needed to move beyond expertise into the realms of creative productivity or eminence[1].

It boils down to three things:

1. Inspiration: he wants to ignite a passion in students and give them the drive to create something “beautiful or wonderful”. He said: “I will lead with that because that’s the one that’s the most exciting. It’s the most fun. It’s the most liberating. Inspiration is what gives people that fire in their belly that allows you to do something.”
2. Aspiration: this involves a student understanding the ‘why’ behind their actions, with a focus on values and purpose. Artists are not as selfish as sometimes perceived, according to Wise. “They want to make the world a more beautiful place, or a more just or fair place, and that aspiration, that value base is really important.”
3. Expectation: Wise will encourage students to have fun and think deeply, while holding them accountable through what he calls “productive tension”. He said: “it’s about raising your expectations progressively as people become creative.”

Risk-taking and raising expectations

Wise argues that risk-taking – another psychosocial skill – is a crucial part of an artist’s creative process and he sees certain parallels between the worlds of art, design and sport. “Risk is fundamental,” he said. “It’s how you innovate, it’s how you come up with something that hasn’t been done before.” Risk-taking is an accompaniment to traits such as openness to experience, tolerance for ambiguity and an ability to move beyond one’s earlier ideas with courage[2].

Wise wants artists to step out of their comfort zones and dare to do something different or unexpected. That includes deliberately setting out to break the rules. “There’s a quote from Picasso – a very problematic figure for me – who said: ‘good artists copy. Great artists steal’. What he means by that is that good artists imitate; great artists take all the knowledge and experience of others and repurpose it.” Risk is about challenging people and pushing them to achieve more than they thought they could. It is also about raising expectations progressively as people become creative.

Navigating RMIT’s ‘critiquing culture’

Risk is about transformation and change; moving people, impacting them and changing their thinking. With this is mind, Wise advocates for a “critiquing culture” that enables students to develop their mental skills, including, mastering anxiety and distractions, tactful self-promotion, and knowing how to play the game[3]. “Almost by definition, it sounds like an attack. Of course, it’s how you challenge and grow and do that damaging I talked about.” He has developed a culture at RMIT, defined by its shared language, trust and a series of team dynamics that create a safe environment that breeds confidence and gives everyone in the room a voice.

All that said, it is not a comfort zone, which raises its own challenge. “Empathy has to be central,” said Wise. “So the role of care alongside risk. I guess it’s a bit like flow state where you have the pain end of the spectrum and the comfort end of the spectrum; and you’re pushing things up towards the pain as much as you can.” He draws the line by setting ground rules for interpersonal conduct and, as a tutor, a simple but important reading of the room for social cues. Still, it can be close to the bone. “I’m on record saying that ‘every art student should cry once’,” added Wise. “It’s about transformation, it’s about change. If they hadn’t experienced something that really does move them or impact them or change their thinking, I haven’t done my job – that’s [on me to do] that in a caring as well as risky way.”

Fun and playfulness

For all the talk of tears, there is fun and playfulness inherent in this process of talent development. On one hand, that means being embodied and engaging in what one wants to do, whether that’s painting or playing sport. “Pleasure is part of that process,” said Wise. On the other hand, there is fun in risk-taking. “That transgression: it’s rule-breaking; it’s another word for innovation and creativity. You can’t do that rule breaking if you’re in a body that’s rule-bound.”

[1] Olszewski-Kubilius P, Subotnik RF, Davis LC, Worrell FC. Benchmarking Psychosocial Skills Important for Talent Development. New Dir Child Adolesc Dev. 2019 Nov;2019(168):161-176. doi: 10.1002/cad.20318. Epub 2019 Oct 29. PMID: 31663255.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

By Henry Breckenridge

Ciarán Frawley’s nerveless penalty for Leinster took the Champions Cup final to extra-time last weekend.

Their opponents, Toulouse, would win 31-22 at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but Frawley’s contribution at fly-half had echoes of his illustrious former teammate, Jonny Sexton, who retired last year.

Both Frawley and Sexton are graduates of Leinster’s esteemed academy, which has propelled the club to the elite of European rugby.

A remarkable 90 per cent of Leinster’s squad was born in Ireland or born to Irish parents abroad, as Simon Broughton, Leinster’s Academy Manager, told the audience at April’s Leaders Meet: Teaching & Coaching at Millfield School. More remarkable still, Leinster provides the backbone of Ireland’s national team, which is currently ranked second in the world of men’s rugby.

Broughton was joined by Huw Jennings, the Head of Football Development at English Premier League club Fulham. The south-west London club enjoy Category One status under the Elite Player Performance Plan and have long been renowned for the calibre of players to pass through their doors. It stretches from Johnny Haynes and World Cup-winner George Cohen in the 1950s to more recent graduates such as Moussa Dembélé, Ryan and Steven Sessegnon and Harvey Elliot.

Bridging the gap between academy and senior level is uppermost in the minds of both academies, but it is not the be-all and end-all.

“We have to have an effective end result for everyone that comes through the programme,” said Jennings, who built his reputation for youth development at Southampton in the early 2000s. “For some, that might be an early exit, but as long as they’ve had an experience they’ve benefited from, learnt from and, hopefully, enjoyed, then that’s a decent return.”

Below, we pick out six reasons why Leinster and Fulham are doing better than most.

1. Holistic development

Both Leinster and Fulham prepare their players for a well-rounded future. Academic study tends to motivate young athletes intellectually and helps them deal with challenges, setbacks and even injuries. Leinster recruit players for their academy at aged 17-20 from clubs across the 12 counties of their province. They have adopted a ‘dual career’ model, where players pursue their studies alongside their rugby. Approximately seven or eight players are selected each year to join Leinster’s senior squad, which means the others must have something else to fall back on.

This is perhaps even more important at Fulham, whose academy recruits players at a much younger age (9 and upwards), with even fewer players making the grade as professional footballers. The club partner with sixth forms such as Raynes Park High School and Ark Globe Academy, both in south London, where older academy players can pursue A-Levels or BTEC qualifications.

2. Nurturing environments

Leinster and Fulham both engineer their environments to facilitate learning and development. Broughton, an experienced player and coach, was appointed Leinster’s Academy Manager in 2021 and has been instrumental in leading the programme at their Ken Wall Centre of Excellence, which opened in 2019. They place an emphasis on teamwork, commitment, integrity, and communication.

The Fulham Academy, which has been led by Jennings since 2008, promotes individual growth within a high-performance setting. Players receive personalised attention, focusing on technical skills, physical conditioning and mental resilience.

Additionally, all players at Fulham, from the younger Foundation Phase up to under-23s, adhere to the academy’s core values, which are known as the 3Hs: honesty, humility and hard work. The club also seeks out diversity in its players and staff to help ensure that their academy better reflects modern society.

3. A self-driven culture

Staff provide support at both clubs, but players are expected to take charge of their own development. Inspired by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Leinster use the phrase ‘the athletes are at work’ as one of their underlying principles. It’s up to the player to put in the work and the team around the athlete will provide them with the tools they need. The club uses blended learning to appeal to the modern academy player in 2024, which means an array of videos, music, open conversations, and presentations to inspire creativity in their players.

At Fulham, Jennings and his colleagues say it is crucial for players to be able to manage their disappointment. They also believe the players that do this best can make the most of the opportunities that come their way. They increasingly find that those perceived to be high-achievers early in their academy journey find it hard to be high-achievers at the end of that journey. “The question to ask yourself is which players can deal with disappointment and, frankly, who can’t,” Jennings told the audience at Millfield.

However, he also emphasised the importance of academy coaches reflecting on their own practice. “We have to adapt to the athlete – not the other way around,” he added. “It’s about learning, it’s about understanding. It’s not referring to it as ‘back in the day’ – it’s about understanding where the athlete is in their journey so that we can relate to them.”

4. Proximal role modelling

There are 60 players in the Leinster building everyday, 20 of whom are in their academy. It enables Broughton and his colleagues to use what they call “proximal role-modelling”. Once upon a time, academy players used their own changing room, whereas now they are fully integrated into the squad. They are able to observe pro athletes each day both on the training pitch and in meetings. “It helps to accelerate their learning and development,” said Broughton, who also spoke of the value in the informal conversations that take place en route to and from the training pitch.

5. Honest conversations

Too often, staff in academy settings put off frank conversations about an athlete’s progress. That is not the case at Fulham. Difficult conversations need to be on the agenda from the off and, according to Jennings, “everything should be couched in positive language – but not at the expense of leaving out the critical message.”

6. Parental involvement

Both clubs increasingly bring parents into the fold, fully acknowledging the role of family in the development of young athletes. For their part, Fulham recognise that young athletes are staying closer to their parental unit than in previous generations. It can be a challenge, as Jennings readily admitted, but the club tries to think of it as a learner who has just passed their driving test. “The parent is invited into the car but they’re not driving the vehicle. It’s not about exclusion: if the individual wants family members included, the club have to manage that,” he said.

By Luke Whitworth

We’ve taken a step back and asked ourselves: what has stood out to us across the sessions and conversations that have taken place at the Leaders Performance Institute in recent weeks?

In answering that question we have composed another Debrief that is specifically designed to set you up for success. We’ll keep you on the pulse of contemporary thinking across the high performance space and provide members with the inspiration to engage with the variety of opportunities on offer through their membership. Do check out some of our upcoming events and virtual learning sessions to connect, learn and share with fellow members from across the globe.

And now, let’s reflect on the pressing performance issues of the day.

Leaders Meet: Teaching & Coaching

Thank you to all our friends at Millfield School and those of you that attended a two-day event devoted to teaching and coaching.

Our thinking was challenged from the outset, and there were several nuggets around how to optimise the learning and development of athletes.

The Leaders Performance Institute’s Henry Breckenridge explored neurodivergence in sport in this eye-opening feature. We also touched upon the student-teacher relationship in a discussion of metacognition – the practice of being aware of one’s own thinking.

As a starting point, we considered the notion that when a teacher teaches, the content is substantially less important than the message they are delivering.

What is the critical factor in getting young people to recall content and skills? Encouraging the student to think about what they’re doing rather than simply just doing it. As a teacher, this means getting them to think about the thing you are telling them and engaging them in active thinking.

The metacognitive cycle encourages learners to be active thinkers. It has three distinct phases:

1. Planning: At the outset, learners consider how to approach a task or problem. They set goals, identify strategies, and decide on an action plan. For example, before studying for an exam, a student might plan to review lecture notes, create flashcards, and allocate specific study time.
2. Monitoring: During the learning process, learners continuously reflect on their progress. They monitor their understanding, evaluate their strategies, and assess whether they are on track. For instance, while reading a complex article, a student might pause to check if they comprehend the main points or if they need to adjust their reading pace.
3. Evaluation: After completing the task, learners evaluate the outcome. They assess the effectiveness of their strategies, identify areas for improvement, and reflect on their overall performance. For instance, after writing an essay, a student might review their writing process, consider feedback, and think about how to enhance their next essay.

Community calls

The struggle to balance medium and long-term planning

The balance between medium and long-term planning was a major theme for our Performance & Strategic Director community of practice group during April.

Members of that group shared how they are making this process and smooth as possible and what aspects were important to get right.

Here are seven factors that emerged from those conversations:

1. Have a really clear destination that is shared and agreed. Is there clarity on what you’re trying to get to and achieve?
2. Assign clear responsibilities and resources for each person or team.
3. Don’t get distracted for the long-term by short-term drama.
4. As a leader of a team or organisation, be transparent.
5. Ensure your debrief process is thorough and includes a broad representation of stakeholders.
6. Engage in comprehensive environment scanning, both internally and externally.
7. Be comfortable with the notion of change. There needs to be both honesty and understanding around the group that, in order to change the reality, you need to change things and, therefore, change is inevitable.

Virtual Roundtables

There were three Leaders Virtual Roundtables in April that covered social media, creativity and wellbeing.

Below, we have lifted some of the key insights delivered by members of the Leaders Performance Institute.

How are you helping your athletes and staff navigate the negatives of social media?

There are positives and negatives to athletes and staff using social media and, in this recent virtual roundtable, Leaders Performance Institute members shared some of the initiatives that have helped them to reduce the negative and elevate the positive.

Lived experience storytelling: athletes in particular tend to have a lot of respect for their peers and the opportunity to listen and engage with them in conversation tends to lead to positive outcomes and reactions. Have alumni or other reputable figures share their positive and negative experiences.

Education: this can be linked to the storytelling point. There is also scope to bring in those with technical expertise who can help people in our teams to better understand the intent of use with social media.

Support structures: it is important to have the right structures in place to support athletes and staff. It may sound simplistic, but do you have a key point person or dedicated welfare support for your people? And if you do, is it communicated early?

Role playing activities: in contrast to passive activities, playing people in scenarios and giving them the chance to experience how it might feel has the potential to be even more powerful.

Mindfulness: mindfulness practice is a growing feature of high performance routines and there is benefit in trying to reduce the noise and distractions that come with social media usage.

If you’re merely hoping for creativity to happen, you’re wasting your time

We’ve always enjoyed this quote: “Creativity is an underrated skill. Creativity is just creating more options – with more options you can make better decisions.” These were the words of Kirk Vallis, Global Head of Creative Capability at Google, when speaking at our Leaders Sport Performance Summit back in 2019.

This roundtable allowed members to discuss how to elevate creativity in our environments. Their work raised five questions to consider when putting in a process to foster creativity:

1. Is yours a conducive environment? it is all well and good talking about being creative – your environment has to be shaped to allow that to happen. It is crucial to create an environment that incentivises and permits creative solutions.
2. What does ‘creativity’ mean to you and your team? Is it, for example, more time for ideation or more time to make better decisions?
3. Do you have an intentional structure that encourages creative thinking? Allow thinking time after meetings or even dedicated interventions during the working week. Leaders should provide clear invitations and dedicated time for creativity, whether they connect the dots or allow their team the space to connect those ideas for themselves. You also need to define what you’re looking for because creativity is the process, not the outcome.
4. Do you understand the barriers in your team? Attendees highlighted common barriers such as the fear of failure, a lack of resources, and a lack of skillsets conducive to creativity.
5. Is this a one-time-only deal? You need time and the structure to review, follow-up and capture ideas to assess if they’re working in practice. You can ask what went well in the journey of considering an idea through to its execution in order to create a continuous learning cycle.

What does it take to build a wellbeing programme?

To end April, Dr Meg Popovic wrapped up her three-part learning series centred on wellbeing, specifically what’s having the most impact and what has and hasn’t worked when embedding a wellbeing programme within an elite sporting environment. A key theme that ran through the conversations was how learning and growth is a key contributing factor to positive wellbeing.

The third session discussed creating a wellbeing programme that operates on three levels:

1. The organisation: this is the notion of ‘systems intelligence’. How do you ‘do’ growth mindset so the organisation can be the growth mindset?
2. The ‘teams of teams’ (departments and units): What does each staff or athlete sub-cultural group need and want to grow in their work and impact? This is a consideration of relational intelligence.
3. The individual: this is rooted in the notion of emotional intelligence. What can be created to amplify individual experience and learning of self, profession and leadership?

By Luke Whitworth

Whatever your thoughts on social media platforms, they are here to stay and will continue to have an impact on your athletes and coaches.

The figures emerging in research are stark: 95% of 13-27-year-olds use YouTube, 67% use TikTok, 62% use Instagram, 59% Snapchat and 35% of those users do so ‘almost constantly’. On top of that, 95% of teens have access to a smartphone and 97% of those ‘use the internet daily’.[1]

If you consider your playing groups, the numbers are probably similar.

Leaders Performance Institute members on a recent Virtual Roundtable agreed that while there can be positives to using social media for their athletes, coaches and staff, their experiences tended to be negative, with inevitable consequences for mental health, wellbeing and performance.

Across the 60-minute session, the group explored a few questions:

• What are some of the ways social media is impacting both athletes and staff?

• What are you experiencing in your environments?

• What are some of the initiatives or practices you have implemented or used in your environments around the impact of social media?

How social media is impacting athletes and staff

The negatives…

Increased exposure to criticism: this is well-documented for athletes but coaches and other staff have noticed an increase in online criticism e.g. if there is a spate of injuries, the medical and other performance disciplines are being targeted. On top of that, several members noted that social media can cause a disconnect between athletes and teammates.

Increased stress and anxiety: athletes in particular are experiencing heightened pressure and the increase of doubt. Social media can stoke feelings of impostor syndrome, prove a huge distraction, and lead to a negative self-obsession. Several members observed that much of what we see and engage with on social media is a false reality.

An increase in threats: this is manifold. There are written threats but also security risks that come with increased accessibility and engagement with false information and a large number of uninformed opinions. There is also a lot of short-termism and it can lead to an unhelpful rollercoaster of emotions.

The positives…

• Athletes have more curiosity in relation to the world.
• The ability to engage with fans can be a positive given how distant the two worlds tend to be.
• Social media enables teams and athletes to build a brand.

Member initiatives that reduce the negative and elevate the positive

Lived experience storytelling: athletes in particular tend to have a lot of respect for their peers and the opportunity to listen and engage with them in conversation tends to lead to positive outcomes and reactions. Have alumni or other reputable figures share their positive and negative experiences.

Education: this can be linked to the storytelling point. There is also scope to bring in those with technical expertise who can help people in our teams to better understand the intent of use with social media.

Support structures: it is important to have the right structures in place to support athletes and staff. It may sound simplistic, but do you have a key point person or dedicated welfare support for your people? And if you do, is it communicated early?

Role playing activities: in contrast to passive activities, playing people in scenarios and giving them the chance to experience how it might feel has the potential to be even more powerful.

Mindfulness: mindfulness practice is a growing feature of high performance routines and there is benefit in trying to reduce the noise and distractions that come with social media usage.

Reference

[1] Putukian M, Blauwet C, Currie A, et al Social media impact on athlete mental health: #RealityCheck British Journal of Sports Medicine 2024; 58: 463-465.

By Henry Breckenridge

What is ‘neurodivergence’?

The term ‘neurodivergence’ can often be perceived to be a blocker in sport, but as Dr Julie White, Head of Learning Support at Millfield School, put it to our members at Leaders Meet: Teaching & Coaching, “neurodivergence is when there are differences from the ‘neurotypical’ as opposed to perceived weaknesses”.

In fact, neurodiverse learners have been known to display high levels of perseverance and demonstrate transferrable resilience into the classroom. They embody the words of Harvey Blume, who was one of the first journalist to cover neurodivergence. In 1998, in the Atlantic, he wrote:

Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will be best at any given moment?

You may be familiar or have heard of neurodivergence through familiarity with such terms as dyslexia, dyspraxia (cognitive learning and gross motor skills), autism (speech, communication and language processing), ADHD (social, emotional and mental health difficulties). But, a lot of the time, the signs and symptoms of these conditions are hidden or less obvious for coaches to pick up on.

It’s critical for coaches and practitioners to have a baseline understanding to ensure they know a) what to look out for; and b) how the various conditions affect decision-making and subsequent performance.  

White breaks down one of the core neurodiverse challenges into two areas related to speed of thinking and recall:

1. Processing speed: individuals who struggle to think on their feet. 
2. Working memory: individuals who struggle to remember verbal instruction. 

Many neurodivergent people will have a weakness in one or both of these areas, regardless of their label.

It’s easiest to think about it as a bucket.

For most of us: information comes in the top, there’s a steady flow. It’s being processed in the middle section at a good speed, and it comes out of ‘the tap’. 

But if your processing speed is slow, your ‘tap’ lets out a lot less water. The info comes in at a fair speed, the bucket fills up very quickly, it can’t drain quickly enough and so it overflows. That’s what happens in young people’s brains where they can’t take in any more information, and they feel overwhelmed. 

On the field/pitch/training, you might see this as: 

• Athletes having difficulty in remembering info from one session to the next.
• Pupils having difficulty sequencing and with routines due to co-ordination difficulties.
• Athletes drifting or being easily distracted as focus is affected.
• Athletes struggling to multi-task (and end up freezing).
• Individuals often having little or no concept of time/urgency.
• Athletes becoming very tired mentally more quickly than others. 

As a coach, you need to… 

Pay attention to the language you use and the quantity of information you give:  

• Keep it chronological: keep it on order in accordance of the process. So, “first do X and then do Y”. Get rid of superfluous language (avoid metaphors). 
• Avoid overwhelming your athlete: limit to three instructions (or less).
• Limit distractions where possible: think of where and how – establish eye contact to ensure you have the player’s attention.
• Tone of voice and audience: Be direct, use short sentences. Translating info into the player’s long-term memory will be more challenging, so be patient.
• Organisation: key dates; planning ahead; prioritising.
• Concept checking: check ‘what have you understood?’ Repeating it will allow you to understand if the recipient has got it. Incorporate show and tell (visual and verbal).

You have to make adaptations. We’re not all the same. It’s about equity and giving them equal access.

Dr Julie White, Head of Learning Support, Millfield School

Coaching checklist

Don’t assume you know the full picture – many players will not acknowledge that they have a difficulty, because:

• They have never been given appropriate support before.
• They be unaware they have difficulties.
• They don’t wany any attention.

A coach should:

• Be an emotionally available adult.
• Break down instructions and check for understanding.
• Use the vocabulary the athlete uses when they’re talking about their own neurodivergence. Avoid abstract phrases such as ‘we need more intensity’. Otherwise, it’s conceptual.
• Remember that athletes may not recall the information long enough to apply it – this is not wilful behaviour and they’re not intending to be rude.
• Find the time to get to know your athlete better. Think ‘I’d love to spend a day in your head’.

By John Portch

“With everybody, we start at the ground floor,” said Lucy Skilbeck.

The Director of Actor Training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art [RADA] is speaking to the Leaders Performance Institute for a two-part interview.

The first focused on the teachers, the second instalment hones in on the students themselves, those coming in on the ‘ground floor’. RADA enrols a talented cohort of 28 acting students each year and works for three years to raise their ceiling.

“What we identify is the talent and the potential for growth, development and passion,” Skilbeck continued. “They are all talented, there’s no question, and they have all done really interesting things before they’ve come to RADA. What the training does is expand the instrument.”

Here, we explore the five most important factors underpinning that process.

1. Breaking the constraints of habits

This is the key point. Skilbeck, who also spoke at the 2023 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, believes that that everyone, including actors is constrained by their habits. “All of which we have developed from earliest infancy,” she said. “These are vocal and physical habits, mental habits, habits of the imagination, and emotional habits.” They can impair an actor’s work. “In other words, you can’t embody someone with an enormous emotional range, that has to go on an enormous emotional journey, if you’re habitually protective of your emotions and not [able] to go to anger, to distress, to passion, then you can’t take the character there either.” The students’ talents are, as Skilbeck explained, “held within whatever the constraints of their own habits”.

2. Expanding an actor’s performance capacity

RADA’s actor training aims to break those habits and expand the acting students’ technical, emotional and imaginative capacity. “Really, what we’re training is how to be a human being and how to embody human experience in imaginary circumstances,” said Skilbeck, adding, “the only way I think that can be done is through the expansion of the self so that there’s access to the vulnerability that allows people to be open and exposed in a way that acting is asking them to do.” There are potential consequences of this approach to training, namely raising fears and psychological trauma.

3. Managing fears and trauma

Skilbeck admitted there is an element of risk in encouraging students to be vulnerable. As such, RADA offers its Student Wellbeing Service through its Student and Academic Services department. The service consists of two main teams: their Disability Service and, of particular interest in a discussion of habits, their Counselling Service. Skilbeck acknowledges that breaking habits can be a difficult process and can potentially being up fears or trauma from past experiences. “We work with a psychologist who hosts sessions with students on resilience early in their training,” she said. “It is both psych ed and giving them strategies for managing what might be potentially overwhelming traumas.” The psychologist is also working with the teaching faculty to develop trauma-informed teaching spaces and practices so that teachers know how to respond and the material is less likely to provoke overwhelming responses for students. “The challenge, which I’m sure is found everywhere, is that people don’t always know what traumas they’ve had until they begin to surface some kind of emotional content that has potentially not surfaced for a while,” Skilbeck continued. “There’s no way we can prevent that entirely, but we do have as many structures around us as we feel we’re able to at the moment. We’re constantly questioning and trying to develop those structures to create those spaces that feel sufficiently secure for the students.”

4. Reflective practice

Reflective practice is another key component of expanding capacity. “In reflective practice, I work with students on taking the observer position so that they can create some space from the sensation, the experience of the release, as much as possible,” said Skilbeck. It is a useful means for acting students to “develop the skills” to reflect on their progress and development and RADA also encourages its students to keep reflective journals. As discussed in part one, RADA reins in formal feedback for the most part in years one and two. A recent course review suggested that even more time be carved out for self-reflection. That can be easier said than done. “That’s like the $64,000 question,” said Skilbeck, who explained that RADA has cleared the calendars for three hours on Thursday afternoons for first and second-year students. She noted that much of the curriculum contributes to the development of independent practice but “we haven’t tied that together sufficiently for students to come out the other way end going ‘I’m really clear on what my skills for independence practice are’.” To this end, RADA has been exploring a second-year project for self-led work. The goal is “to make sure students are confident in their understanding of what ultimately becomes the capacity to create, devise and lead on their own project work and production work, if they so choose to do.”

5. Embracing failure

Just as Skilbeck believes teachers will get things wrong in their practice, so will students – and this is to be embraced. “This is something we talk about a lot because we’re encouraging people to not to try and get it right and to allow failure to be part of one’s creative practice,” she said. “You can’t have a creative practice if you’re not willing to fail. You can only have a complacent practice because you’ll only try the things that you know will succeed. To have a creative practice you have to be willing to accept a degree of failure – and I think that goes for all of us – those trying to lead, run and develop courses as well as those who are participating on them.”

Further reading:

‘At RADA we Want Teachers to Follow the Students as Well as Guide them’

By John Portch

When the pandemic spread in 2020, it brought challenges for all. In the case of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art [RADA] a number of those challenges endure.

RADA no longer relies upon online classes as it did in 2020 and 2021, but, as Lucy Skilbeck, their Director of Actor Training, explained in a recent interview, “we have made changes not only to the curriculum but how we consider the curriculum and some of our approaches to teaching.”

One such change was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, which grew in prominence during that first year of the pandemic as systemic inequalities became evident in the higher infection and mortality rates in globe majority communities in the US, UK and beyond. Compounding matters was the succession of highly publicised, racially-motivated, tragic incidents involving Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd.

The student body at RADA felt moved to speak up. “The students began to question our processes, some of our approaches, and some of our choices of material,” Skilbeck told the Leaders Performance Institute.

As the pandemic pushed everything online, Skilbeck’s students were working on three Restoration-era texts (plays written in England, Scotland and Ireland between 1660 and 1710). While this era was a time of revival in the dramatic arts – theatres had been closed for 18 years under Puritan rule prior to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy – there is a problematic link between Restoration drama and the Atlantic slave trade. RADA students raised the probability that some patrons of the Restoration-era arts benefited directly from the sale of enslaved African people for labour.

“One group chose to continue doing the Restoration project,” Skilbeck continued. “Two groups said they didn’t want to continue working with that material, so we made adaptations on the spot.”

Four years later, RADA continues to teach Restoration material (“that’s one of the reasons students come to RADA”) but has added a contextual evaluation of all texts – not just the Restoration era – for students and RADA project leaders.

“One of the big changes is how we contextualise how we discuss, how we critically examine and reflect on what the challenges are with any of the material we’re using.

“We’ve got more work to do, no question, but students are now saying they feel confident doing the work because the conversations can happen, are happening, are considered. That was the really big piece we weren’t doing before. We weren’t considering the impact of that work on globe majority students separately to the impact on white students.

“We were informally trying to make sure that was a consideration. Now we’ve made that a formal commitment.”

As Skilbeck once said during a Leaders webinar in 2021: “At RADA, we want teachers to follow the students as well as guide them”.

Contextual evaluation in the wake of Black Lives Matter is but one example of how this plays out at RADA. We discuss the others in the first of a two-part interview with Skilbeck. In the second, we focus on student development.

Listen to learners – they’ll tell you what they need

The Leaders Performance Institute asked Skilbeck to explain the dynamic of RADA tutors both following and guiding their students.

“The rationale is that the best teachers are the ones who are continually learning and who can be in a learner’s or a beginner’s mind,” she said. “In order to do that, one has to be willing to learn from the people we are teaching; and we will continually learn from the students because they are bringing the world now as it is for young people.

“That comes with them distinctly each year – and it changes year on year, as the world does – and so there’s a lot of learning to be done by listening to the students, by engaging with the students, by allowing students to educate us on what the world is for them and what they need in a learning environment.”

It does not mean Skilbeck and her colleagues always get it right. “Like all human activity, it is imperfect,” she said. “Sometimes it feels like things really develop and grow and, as a result, we move towards something more progressive; and sometimes it feels like they don’t. I don’t think there’s any way around that.”

Allow for meaningful engagement and contributions

It is tempting to view a dramatic production as akin to a team strategy or gameplan. There are parallels and both are ensemble activities. At RADA, it is another area where project leaders – managers of educational programmes, theatrical productions, or development initiatives – bring people together.

“Speaking as a director, which is my professional background, one of the roles of the director and the rehearsal process is to bring everybody into the same world so that everybody is in the play at the same time. That can sometimes be a struggle because there might be people with very strong ideas in one direction and others having strong ideas in another.”

The key is allowing cast members to contribute meaningfully. “A way we would begin to do that is close, detailed work on the story we want to tell collectively, because any play has an infinite number of possible interpretations, stories or emphases contained within it; and any production has to make a choice that it’s going to tell a particular part of that story.”

RADA uses ‘yes and’ work as it “develops the capacity to be ‘in response to’; so one is being reactive rather than generating one’s own action. A lot of that is built through gradually training people’s capacity to be working within an ensemble rather than standing to the side of an ensemble.

“A big part of what we do is trying to bring people to that place where they go ‘I can be here in a way that serves you’ and we talk about that quite explicitly.”

No right answer

At RADA, first and second-year acting students are no longer marked. “One of the big things we have to do early and throughout the training is really try and undo – it’s a really harsh way of putting it – some of the damage that the traditional school system does,” said Skilbeck, who was quick to explain that she is supportive of numerous elements of the scholastic system.

It is, however, a challenge for students. “We’re saying there isn’t a right answer – we’re not asking for the right answer,” she continued. Instead, “what we’re looking for is a much more holistic development of the whole person because that’s what an actor needs. Not ‘yes, I can’.

“I want them to have the capacity to interpret material but it doesn’t have to be the way that I would do it. What we want to do is develop their capacity to learn and to grow themselves and, therefore, be able to recognise and experience their own growth and development.”

Further reading:

Five Ways RADA Is Raising the Performance Ceiling of its Acting Students