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A quick note, I am keenly aware of the countless cases of physical abuse in sport. I think we have overreacted and have created environments where coaches and other leaders are too scared to lay a hand on a player. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic, finding roughly half of U.S. adults report experiencing it, and identifying isolation as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and early death. This doesn’t touch on the performance implications that this loneliness has on teams.

We are social creatures, and if you go to your local zoo and observe its primates, our distant cousins, you will see how big a role touch plays in building and maintaining relationships. Teams are modern tribes of strangers coming together because they are top performers in their sport. Trying to create trust and relationships without building physical touch into the interactions, between players and staff alike, seems unnatural.

Touch does something the rest of our communication doesn’t. A hug triggers the release of oxytocin, the hormone most associated with trust and bonding, and at the same time lowers cortisol, the hormone your body produces under stress. That combination moves you out of a stress response and toward something calmer, almost immediately.

But how does this affect performance? In 2010, researchers Michael Kraus, Cassey Huang, and Dacher Keltner published a study in the journal Emotion that coded every instance of physical contact across an entire NBA season, high fives, fist bumps, chest bumps, hugs, and compared it to how well players and teams performed (Kraus, Huang & Keltner, 2010). Early-season touch predicted better performance later in the season, for individuals and for teams, and the relationship held even after accounting for player status, preseason expectations, and how the team had performed early on. Touch came first. Cooperation and performance followed it.

The touchiest player in the league that season was Kevin Garnett of the Celtics. Dacher Keltner has said that within 600 milliseconds of a teammate shooting a free throw, Garnett had already reached out and touched four different guys (Keltner, quoted in ESPN, 2010). That season, the Celtics and the Lakers, two of the best teams in the league, were also among the most touch-bonded. The Kings and the Bobcats, two of the league’s worst teams, touched each other the least. Garnett wasn’t running an experiment. He was building trust the way people have always built it, with contact, and the research just caught up to what he already knew.

None of this means every coach should start hugging indiscriminately. The caution around physical contact in sport exists for real reasons, and I don’t think that history should be waved away. But there’s a real difference between a coach touching a player without consent or context, and a coach who reads a player well enough to know when a hand on the shoulder or a real hug is what that person needs, and offers it openly, in a way the player is free to decline. One of those is the actual danger. The other is one of the most basic tools we have for building belonging, and most coaches have quietly stopped using it out of self-protection rather than any real read on what their athlete needs.

When was the last time you actually touched one of your athletes on purpose, not a distracted high five, but a real hand on the shoulder or a real hug after something hard? If it’s been a while, what were you actually protecting by pulling back?

Until next week,
Caleb Cousens

Join the Advantage community — the home for serious performance practitioners: advantage.community

My current focus is filling a gap I see, namely performance coaches come out of school with amazing specialized knowledge and craft, but without the leadership skills to apply them in high performance environments, and without the business skills to monetize them and create a sustainable career.

I’m building a professional development community across these two topics, and have partnered with Alex Auerbach, current Performance Psychologist for the Jacksonville Jaguars, to do it.

On this journey, I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership and what it means. And I have been reading a ton about it, so I thought it would be great to share one of my findings this week and hopefully provide a mirror for you around your leadership currently. I can tell you, in my short career in formal and informal positions of leadership, it is the most challenging, rewarding, frustrating, scary and growth inducing journey. Much like parenting, the act of choosing to lead will deconstruct you and build you into a better person, let alone leader.

“At West Point, influenced directly by the reflections of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, I finally crystallized a short definition of leadership that best fits with everything I’ve suited and observed.

That definition is simply this: Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. Leadership is not personality, Leadership is not charisma. Leadership is not power. Leadership is not giving orders. Leadership has nothing to do with position or rank or title or any of that. True leadership only exists if people follow when they would otherwise have the freedom to not follow.”

Jim Collins in What to Make of a Life

West Point may be the institution that has been most successful in developing leaders, and General Eisenhower was certainly one of the greatest leaders in a generation of great leaders.

Leadership is bringing people along with you towards your vision or goals. It is creating the buy in or understanding of athletes so that they make the time and value your services, be that performance psychology, strength & conditioning or another discipline.

This is the gap I see constantly. Coaches spend years mastering their discipline and can create a kick-ass power point presentation with cutting edge science. They assume athletes will follow because of their knowledge, the letters behind their name, or the irrefutable evidence they present.

But knowledge doesn’t earn trust. Leadership is the skill that turns expertise into influence, and it’s the one most coaches are never taught.

Are you an effective leader currently?

Networking is one of those skills that has become as much about spamming people on LinkedIn as anything else. I’d like to propose the term “connecting” is much better and will yield much greater results, leading to an incredibly fulfilling, rich life.

Connecting at an authentic, human level requires that you actually care about learning about the person across from you. You need to approach the conversation without an explicit agenda while ensuring that you are just as concerned about providing, as getting value from them.

But all along I was missing the point. Viewing connecting as a way to genuinely get to know people who could become friends, or at least a friendly face at a future event changes how you approach these conversations. Connecting isn’t about collecting as many business cards or linkedIn connections as you can, it should be about human beings that have the chance to enrich your life and you theirs.

The ancient Greek root for knowing someone or gaining personal knowledge is ginōskō (γινώσκω). It is about interpersonal familiarity and emphasizes a living, moving relationship with the person or thing known, rather than a static catalog of facts. This speaks to depth, not surface level details you get from small talk.

I’ve been playing around with different ways to start a conversation with someone for the first time to help facilitate depth and connection. It’s also fun to watch people’s faces when they don’t get the classic “What do you do?” or “How are you?” lines.

“What is going well in your life right now?”

“What is a new habit or boundary you have added to your life recently that made it better?”

“What is a goal you are working toward right now that excites you?”

Most coaches I talk to aren’t great at this. They spend so much interpersonal time and energy with their staffs and players, that their battery is drained. Usually, this has a detrimental impact on their personal life. It can also hurt them at a career level due to a lack of new voices in their life.

What is one thing you can do this week to cultivate a new connection?

Jim Collins is one of my favorite researchers, and I’m currently working my way through his newest book, What to Make of a Life. In it, he shares a framework he calls simplex stepping, built from an idea he traces to the mathematician George Dantzig.

Dantzig invented the simplex method in the 1940s, an algorithm for solving problems with too many variables to see all at once. Instead of trying to map the entire solution space, the method finds a starting point and moves to the next best neighboring point, over and over, always improving, until it reaches the optimal answer. You never need to see the whole shape of the problem. You only need the best next move from where you’re already standing.

Collins applies the same logic to a career. Simplex stepping means taking the best step visible right in front of you without needing to know your ultimate destination, then from that new position, identifying the next best step. He illustrates it with Katharine Graham, who spent seven years simplex stepping her way into her leadership identity at the Washington Post before the Pentagon Papers and Watergate gave her the moment to demonstrate who she’d become. She didn’t have a ten-year plan sitting in a drawer in 1963. She took the next right step, then the next, until she was ready for a moment nobody could have scheduled in advance.

Most career advice assumes the opposite. Map the destination first, then plan backward. Simplex stepping suggests that’s backward for a reason. You often can’t see the destination clearly enough to plan toward it, and waiting until you can is its own way of never moving.

Perspective: Stop Waiting for the Whole Staircase Before You Move

Coaches love to ask young practitioners where they see themselves in five years. It’s a reasonable question and it usually produces an answer that’s mostly fiction, because nobody actually knows, and pretending to know teaches people to perform certainty instead of building it.

What actually predicts whether someone builds a real career isn’t the quality of their long-term plan. It’s whether they take the next visible step in front of them and pay enough attention to recognize the one after that. The practitioners who end up somewhere worth being rarely got there by executing a five-year plan. They got there by being unusually good at noticing the next right move and taking it, repeatedly, long before the destination was visible.

If you’re mentoring someone who’s stuck because they can’t see where the path leads, the answer isn’t to help them build a more detailed map. It’s to help them get honest about the next step in front of them right now, and trust that the step after that will become visible once they’ve taken it.

Story: Jim Collins’ Bug Book

In his twenties, Collins was, in his own description, lost in the fog of youth. His mentor at Stanford, Rochelle Myers, gave him an assignment that sounds almost too simple to matter. Observe yourself without judgment. Study yourself like a bug.

Collins started carrying a small composition notebook, writing down observations about himself without knowing what he was looking for or where it was leading. No plan, no destination, just the discipline of noticing.

One day at work, he was asked to make sense of the early days of network computing for his team, to take something genuinely complicated and explain it clearly enough for people to actually use it. Something clicked. Looking back through the bug book, he recognized a pattern he’d been recording without realizing what it meant. He was wired, in his own term, to take complexity and make it teachable. Not a skill he’d trained into himself. A capacity that had been there the whole time, waiting to be noticed.

He didn’t set out with a plan to become one of the most read business researchers of his generation. He took the next visible step and wrote down what he noticed. Only years later could he see the shape of where all those small steps had actually taken him.

The bug book wasn’t a plan. It was a discipline of paying close enough attention to recognize the next right step when it showed up, and having the record to prove the pattern was real instead of just a feeling.

Question:

What’s the smallest next visible step you’ve been putting off because you can’t see the whole staircase yet? What would it look like to start writing down what you actually notice about yourself and your work, instead of waiting for a five-year plan to arrive before you move?

Closing Thought:

You don’t need to see the whole staircase.

You need the next step, and the discipline to notice it.

The plan usually isn’t ready before you are.

Pay attention to what you’re actually wired for, not what you think you should want.

Take the step in front of you. The next one will become visible from there.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

Join the Advantage community — the home for serious performance practitioners: advantage.community

In almost every mentorship conversation I have inside Advantage, coaches eventually describe the job the same way. It’s isolating. You can’t be fully equal with your players. You often can’t be fully honest with the people above you either, not if you want to keep your job. You move from city to city as contracts end, and the person at your exact level inside the building is usually nobody, because there’s only one of you.

Researchers have measured what that isolation actually costs. Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s meta-analysis of over 300,000 people found that weak social connection carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day, and a bigger risk than obesity or physical inactivity. Isolation isn’t just an unpleasant feeling that fades on its own. It behaves like a chronic health condition.

The coaching profession produces this condition structurally. Solitary decision-making, hierarchical distance from the players you lead, and a career that keeps uprooting you before real friendships take hold all push in the same direction. Most of the industry still treats that as an unavoidable feature of being in charge rather than a risk worth managing.

Perspective: Isolation Is a Professional Liability, Not a Personality Trait

Most coaches treat isolation as private terrain. Something to endure quietly, maybe mention to a partner or a close friend, but not something that belongs in a performance conversation. That framing is too generous.

A coach who cannot maintain real relationships outside the building eventually loses the ability to maintain them inside it too. The isolation doesn’t stay contained to their personal life. It shows up as distance from players, thinner communication with staff, and a growing inability to read the room, because reading a room requires practice most isolated people have stopped getting anywhere in their life. Isolation is not a badge of honor. It’s a serious professional and personal liability, and it should be treated as one.

Organizations already act on this after the damage is done. A coach loses the room, results collapse, and the club fires him citing the fallout. What rarely happens is any of that getting assessed earlier, before it costs a season or a job. Teams evaluate technical ability, tactical knowledge, and communication skill in hiring processes. Whether a candidate has genuine relationships and support outside the role predicts how they’ll behave under sustained pressure just as reliably, and it belongs in that same evaluation. Organizations that ignore it are gambling on a version of the person that only exists in a job interview.

Story: What It Took for Urban Meyer to Notice His Own Warning Signs

By 2009, Urban Meyer had already won two national championships at Florida in five seasons, by every outward measure one of the most successful coaches in the country. On December 6 of that year, after Florida lost to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game, Meyer went home with chest pains. His wife called 911 at 4:30 in the morning. He was hospitalized and treated for dehydration.

That week he announced his resignation. Days later he changed course and called it an indefinite leave of absence instead, then returned within weeks to coach Florida to a win in the Sugar Bowl on January 1, 2010. He later told the New York Times there was no heart damage. “It was the pattern of what I was doing and how I was doing it,” he said. “It was self-destructive.”

In a 2014 interview, Meyer admitted what that pattern actually looked like from the inside. During the 2009 season, he was depressed and, in his words, “mentally broke.” He relied on alcohol and Ambien to sleep and lost 37 pounds over a season his team went 13-1. None of it showed up in the results. It showed up in him.

A year later, the same story repeated almost exactly. On December 8, 2010, Meyer resigned from Florida for good, citing his health and, in his own words, the need to “re-evaluate my priorities of faith and family.”

Nothing external forced Meyer to confront what was happening to him. His team kept winning. His job was never in danger from the outside. The job had simply crowded out everything that wasn’t the job, including the faith and family he later said he needed to return to, and it took his body collapsing twice in twelve months before he treated that as urgent enough to act on.

The skill missing wasn’t toughness or willpower. It was noticing the pattern the first time, in his own words, instead of needing it to repeat before he believed it.

Question:

If your organization looked honestly at how isolated you are right now, not how good your results have been, would they see a risk building? And if you’re being honest with yourself, is there a version of your own story that already looks like the early chapters of this one?

Closing Thought:

Isolation is not a badge of honor.
It’s a professional liability, and a personal one.
It is visible before the results ever suffer, if anyone bothers to look.
Organizations that only notice it after the collapse were always going to be too late.
Measure it like you’d measure any other risk to the job.

Until next week,
Caleb Cousens

Join the Advantage community — the home for serious performance practitioners

I’ve noticed a pattern in myself over the last few years. Christmas comes and goes, and then I start a six or seven month grind without really looking up or taking a breath. By the time June or July rolls around and I finally get some vacation, I realize my tank has been empty for weeks.

Performance researchers Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz built an entire framework around this exact pattern, working first with elite athletes and later with executives. Their core finding was that high performance has less to do with managing time and more to do with managing energy, across the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions. Energy has to move in cycles of expenditure and renewal. Athletes train this way on purpose. Sprint, then recover. Push, then rebuild. Nobody expects a body to sprint for seven months straight.

Leadership somehow gets treated as the exception. We ask ourselves to run in a straight line from January to July with no built-in recovery, as if the same principle that governs a hamstring doesn’t apply to attention, patience, and presence.

The decline that follows isn’t a cliff. It’s gradual enough that you can miss it in yourself for months, right up until vacation forces you to stop and notice how far you’ve drifted.

Perspective: The Cost Shows Up in Other People First

Here’s the part that makes this hard to catch in real time. When your energy runs out, it doesn’t usually show up first in your own numbers or your own output. It shows up in how you treat the people around you. You get short with someone who didn’t deserve it. You have less capacity for a hard conversation you’d normally handle well. You stop having energy for the social situations that used to come easily.

Coaching culture tends to reward the opposite instinct. Grinding through without a break gets read as dedication. Taking recovery seriously can feel like admitting you’re not tough enough for the job. That framing has it backwards. An empty tank doesn’t make you more committed. It makes you a worse version of the leader your people actually need.

If you’re running your team on the same empty tank you’ve been running yourself on, ask honestly whose performance you’re protecting by refusing to rest.

Story: What Six Months of Grinding Actually Cost Me

The pattern is consistent enough now that I can see it coming before it happens. Christmas gives me a real break. Then the calendar fills in and I stop tracking it. Six months pass. Seven. I keep telling myself I’ll build in a breather once things settle, and things never settle.

By the time I get to a real vacation in June or July, I can feel how depleted I actually am. And if I’m honest with myself, I haven’t just been tired. I’ve been a worse leader because of it. Less patient with people who needed more patience than I had to give. Less energy for the social situations, the check-ins, the moments that build the relationships I actually care about.

What makes this worth naming is that all of this happens even with a strong family, a supportive community, and routines that are relatively healthy. I’m not running on empty because the supports aren’t there. I’m running on empty because I let the grind override the supports I already have. I genuinely don’t want to think about what this pattern would do to someone without those things in place.

The skill I’m still building isn’t willpower. It’s catching the pattern in month three instead of month six, and being honest enough with myself to act on it before vacation has to do the work a decision earlier in the year should have done.

Question:

Think about your own year. Is there a point, maybe not Christmas to summer like mine, but some stretch, where you consistently run yourself down without noticing until you’re already empty? What has that cost the people closest to you, and would they say the same thing about you that you’d say about yourself?

Closing Thought:

Energy management is not a personal indulgence. It’s a leadership responsibility. The cost of ignoring it doesn’t show up in your own scorecard first. It shows up in the people who depend on you. Catch the pattern before vacation has to catch it for you.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

Join the Advantage community — the home for serious performance practitioners: advantage.community

Every few weeks in Advantage, a coach asks me some version of the same question. What do you do when the relationship with a player is already broken. Usually they’re describing one blowup, a confrontation, a moment where something got said that couldn’t be unsaid. They want to know how to undo that moment.

But the research on relationship repair, most of it done by John Gottman studying marriages, doesn’t actually support that framing. Gottman found that strong relationships aren’t defined by the absence of conflict. They’re defined by successful repair attempts after conflict. The relationships that fail aren’t the ones with the biggest arguments. They’re the ones where small bids for connection went unanswered often enough that both people stopped making them.

That means the blowup a coach remembers is rarely the actual cause. It’s the moment the damage became visible. The real erosion usually happened earlier and quieter, in a string of small moments neither person thought was worth naming.

Which changes the question. It’s not “how do I undo that one conversation.” It’s “has anyone actually tried to repair this, or has everyone just been managing around it.”

Perspective: You Cannot Out-Perform a Broken Relationship

The instinct most coaches have when a relationship with a player goes sideways is to work harder at the work. Cleaner sessions, clearer tactical communication, more patience in the moment. The hope is that consistency will quietly repair what a hard conversation never addressed.

Sometimes that works. Usually it doesn’t, because good tactical coaching and a repaired relationship are two different products, and one does not substitute for the other. A player can respect your technical input and still not trust you. Those can sit side by side for a long time before something forces the issue.

Repair takes naming the damage out loud. Not a generic check-in, not “how are things going,” but an actual acknowledgment of the specific moment or pattern that broke something. Coaches avoid this because it feels like admitting failure, or because they’re afraid the conversation will make things worse before it makes them better. Both are true risks. Avoiding the conversation just trades a fast, uncomfortable risk for a slow, guaranteed one.

Story: Two Coaches, Two Broken Relationships, Two Different Calls

Phil Jackson inherited Dennis Rodman in 1995, a player whose relationship with authority, structure, and most of his previous coaches had already collapsed by the time he got to Chicago. Jackson didn’t try to bring Rodman into the standard team structure. During the 1998 playoffs, he agreed to let Rodman take a sanctioned 48-hour trip to Las Vegas in the middle of the postseason, a decision that would have ended most coaching relationships on the spot if it had gone wrong. Jackson’s bet was that trust built through flexibility would keep Rodman more engaged than trust demanded through rules. Rodman came back and helped the Bulls win another title. Jackson didn’t fix Rodman. He built a version of trust that worked for who Rodman actually was, instead of who a standard system needed him to be.

Pep Guardiola made the opposite call. When he took over Barcelona in 2008, Ronaldinho was still one of the most talented players in the world, a two-time FIFA World Player of the Year and a symbol of everything the club had recently been. But the relationship between Ronaldinho and the discipline the team needed had already broken down before Guardiola arrived. Guardiola didn’t try to repair it. In one of his first acts as manager, he told Ronaldinho he wasn’t part of the plan and moved him on to AC Milan within weeks. Guardiola’s read was that some relationships aren’t damaged, they’re simply over, and treating them as repairable wastes time that should go toward building something that can actually work.

Both coaches were right, because they were answering different questions. Jackson decided Rodman’s relationship with the team was worth the unconventional work of repairing. Guardiola decided Ronaldinho’s wasn’t, and that honesty about that was more useful than another attempt at repair. The skill in both cases wasn’t loyalty or toughness. It was an honest diagnosis of which situation they were actually in.

Question:

Think of a relationship with a player or staff member that feels stuck right now. Have you actually named what’s broken between you, or have you been quietly managing around it and hoping better work will fix it? And if you’re honest, is this a relationship you believe can be repaired, or one you’ve been avoiding ending?

Closing Thought:

Damage rarely happens in one moment.
It builds in the small moments nobody names.
Some relationships are worth the uncomfortable work of repairing.
Some are just over, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time.
The skill is knowing which one you’re actually standing in.

Until next week,
Caleb Cousens

Join the Advantage community — the home for serious performance coaches

Last month, my wife and I decided our two-year-old was ready to potty train. We cleared the weekend, took the diaper off for good, and braced for tantrums about sitting on the toilet.

The tantrums came. What surprised me was everything else. For the first three or four days, she was a different kid outside the bathroom too. She wanted to be held more than she had in months. She napped through stretches she normally fought hard against, and slept longer at night. For three mornings in a row, she fell asleep mid-morning in my wife’s arms, something that hadn’t happened since she was an infant.

None of that had anything to do with the toilet. It had to do with the fact that we had changed her entire relationship to her own body’s signals overnight, and she was spending real resources learning how to read them. The extra clinginess and the extra sleep were not a step backward. They were the cost of something new becoming automatic.

This is not just a cute parenting observation. The brain makes up about two percent of our body weight but burns roughly twenty percent of our resting energy, and that share climbs when we are encoding something genuinely unfamiliar. Sleep researchers have spent decades showing that new motor skills get consolidated during sleep, replayed and strengthened hours after the learning actually happened. My daughter wasn’t avoiding the lesson by sleeping more. She was still doing it, just somewhere I couldn’t see.

We talk about learning like it should be instant, like information goes in one day and skill comes out the next. It has never worked that way for a two-year-old, and it does not work that way for the people we coach either.

Perspective: Delivering Information Is Not the Same as Teaching

Most coaches measure their teaching by how much they say. More corrections, more reps, more information delivered in a session gets treated as more coaching done. It feels productive. It is also the wrong measure, because the athlete’s brain has a limited amount of processing capacity available at any given moment, and every additional correction on top of an already full load competes for the same shrinking resource.

Cognitive load theory has shown this for decades in education research. A novice performing a task carries far more mental load than an expert doing the exact same thing, because the expert has automated what the novice is still consciously working out step by step. Pile new information on top of an already loaded working memory and very little of it lands. Some of it actively pushes out what you taught five minutes earlier.

The coaches who teach most effectively are not the ones who say the most. They chunk the lesson down to what the athlete can actually hold, they space out the corrections instead of stacking them, and they read fatigue as information rather than as a discipline problem. A blank stare or a short fuse late in a teaching session usually is not attitude. It is a brain running low on the resource it needs to keep learning.

If your athletes look worn out after you have taught them something new, ask yourself whether you built any room for that cost, or whether you just kept talking until the session ended.

Story: The Diaper, the Naps, and What My Daughter Couldn’t Hide

By the end of the first week, she had it. Not perfectly. There were accidents into the second week, and a few regressions when we traveled. But the extra sleep and the extra clinginess started fading back to normal right around the time the skill itself started to feel automatic to her. Her brain had finished doing the expensive part of the work.

What stuck with me was how honest her body was about the cost the whole way through. She could not tell us she was overwhelmed. She did not have the words for it yet. But she showed us, in the only ways available to her, that something demanding was happening beneath the surface. The clinginess was a request for security while her world felt less predictable. The sleep was her brain doing overtime on something we had asked of her without warning.

Adults are just better at hiding the same signals. A staff member learning a new system, an athlete unlearning an old technique, a young coach adjusting to a new way of giving feedback, they are running a version of the same process my daughter ran that week. They just know how to show up on time and nod along while they do it.

Watching my daughter’s body tell the truth she couldn’t put into words gave me a level of empathy for the people I coach that I did not have two months ago. I already knew learning was hard in theory. I had not felt how expensive it actually is to watch it happen to someone who cannot fake being fine.

Question:

Think about the last time you taught someone on your staff or roster something that required them to unlearn an old habit first, not a small tweak, but a real change. Did you build any recovery into that process afterward, or did you read their tiredness and short temper as a discipline problem instead of the cost you should have expected?

Closing Thought:

Learning is not free.

It draws on a real and limited budget every time.

The best teachers plan for the withdrawal, not just the deposit.

Your people are not being lazy when they are tired from learning something hard.

They are paying the price you asked them to pay.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

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Join the Advantage community — the home for serious high-performance practitioners: advantage.community

I ran the first of a series of book club sessions with performance coaches on Monday this week. We’re studying Gilbert Enoka’s “Become Unstoppable.” One thing that’s become clear to me, as a long-time student of the New Zealand All Blacks, is that their sustained excellence has never been fully explained by the tactical, strategic, physical, or mental. There’s a meaning element, an emotional element, a spiritual element that most teams miss, most performance books skip past, and most conversations about high performance never reach.

Owen Eastwood writes about whakapapa in “Belonging,” the Māori concept of lineage and shared identity, and the way it gave the All Blacks a story to live inside. It connected them to something bigger than the current squad, the current season, the current scoreboard. Meaning at that level operates differently than a psychological skill or a process framework. Most coaching conversations don’t know how to build it.

Viktor Frankl survived years in Nazi concentration camps watching people live or die. He saw the pattern directly: people with a reason to keep going, kept going. He built a therapeutic framework, logotherapy, around the claim that meaning is the primary human motivator, above pleasure and above power. His work was about survival. But the principle extends anywhere humans are being asked to push through something hard.

The question I keep returning to is why high performance culture, which has spent decades building sophisticated frameworks for the tactical, physical, and mental, still treats the spiritual and the meaningful as an afterthought, or an embarrassment, or someone else’s department.

Perspective: The Research That Doesn’t Make It Into Most Coaching Conversations

The performance coaching conversation has moved in a clear direction over the last decade, toward data, process, psychological safety, and evidence-based practice. These are real and important corrections to cultures that needed correcting.

But somewhere in that shift, meaning got quietly deprioritized. It is harder to measure, harder to build into a periodization plan, harder to put on a slide deck. So it gets acknowledged and then skipped.

Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale has spent her career studying how people relate to their work. Her research consistently shows that people who experience what they do as a calling, rather than a job or a career, outperform across almost every measure. They invest more, recover faster, and sustain effort longer. The mechanism is meaning, not better incentives or stronger accountability structures.

Martin Seligman’s PERMA model identifies meaning as one of five pillars of sustainable performance. Coaches who have applied it in sport find it changes the questions they ask. You stop asking “how do we build intensity?” and start asking “do these players know why this actually matters to them?”

The sociologist Émile Durkheim studied religious ritual and identified what he called collective effervescence: the surge of energy, unity, and emotional elevation that emerges when a group engages in shared practice with genuine intent. He was not studying sport. But the finding travels. When a group of people gather around something they actually believe in, something shifts in them that individual motivation cannot produce and tactical preparation cannot replicate.

The research on this is consistent. The question is whether coaches are building meaning intentionally, or leaving it to chance.

Story: Morocco’s Circle

On the same day as the book club, the FIFA World Cup gave me exactly the illustration I couldn’t have scripted.

In their round of 32 match against the Netherlands, Morocco took a tight game to a penalty shootout. Before the first penalty was taken, the squad gathered in a circle and recited Surah Al-Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Quran, making a collective dua, a shared supplication. Head coach Mohamed Ouahbi led them. He has built a culture where prayer replaces the tactical huddle before moments like this.

What it produces is visible in the footage: a kind of stillness, a unified focus, something to step into rather than escape from. Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School has run studies showing that pre-performance rituals, even invented ones, measurably reduce anxiety and improve output under pressure. Part of the mechanism is focus, and part is identity. The ritual communicates something to the group: this is who we are, and this is what we do before we go into something difficult.

For the Moroccan players, the ritual is not invented. It is genuine. A ritual rooted in real shared belief operates at a different level. It does not just focus the mind. It connects each player to something larger than the penalty they are about to take.

They won the shootout and advanced.

The Netherlands were not without their own source of meaning. Cody Gakpo played through the tournament carrying the loss of his and his partner’s unborn child. The Dutch squad carried that weight together. Meaning gathered around a person, a loss, a shared grief, is real and powerful. The result went to Morocco. But both teams showed what happens when a group of players has something more than tactics to play for.

Question:

Do your players know what they are playing for beyond the scoreboard?

Closing Thought:

Most coaches know, somewhere, that meaning matters. They have seen it in a locker room before a must-win game, or in the way a team responds when something personal is on the line.

They have felt the difference between a group that is executing and a group that is alive.

Meaning tends to get created by accident when it gets created at all. A shared hardship, a player people rally around, a coach who happens to frame the mission in a way that lands. Most teams are not building it deliberately.

The All Blacks built it deliberately. Morocco is building it deliberately. The research from Wrzesniewski, Seligman, and Durkheim points in the same direction. Meaning is one of the most significant performance variables available to a team, and the coaching world is largely leaving it on the table.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

Tunisia and Coaching Attrition

You don’t need to look any further than the English Premier League where there were a whopping 11 coaching changes in the past season to know that the role of manager is a precarious one at best in football.

But things got turned up a notch by the Tunisian Football Association when they fired their manager, Sabri Lamouchi, after one game at the World Cup, probably the most extraordinary managerial move in World Cup history.

African football is notoriously chaotic but this was a different level, and the question was: who would want to jump into the breach to try to right the ship with mere days before Tunisia’s next, and deciding match against Japan.

Enter Herve Renard, a man whose managerial career has been forged in the chaotic firestorm that is Africa and the Middle East.

Renard is not a glamorous hire. He won the Africa Cup of Nations with Zambia in 2012, a result that genuinely stunned the continent. He did it again with Ivory Coast in 2015. What he brings to a situation like this is the ability to walk into a broken environment and not flinch. Tactics can come later. First you need someone who doesn’t need the conditions to be perfect before they do their job.

Tunisia lost to Japan anyway. The intervention changed nothing about the result. Which raises an uncomfortable question about what the federation’s decision actually accomplished. They created maximum disruption, handed the chaos to one of the most experienced coaches on the continent, and still went home early. Whether Lamouchi would have done any better, nobody will ever know now.

We talk about managerial changes as if they are solutions. Sometimes they are. This one was a message. The question is who it was for.

Tunisia made one of the most dramatic managerial decisions in World Cup history and ended up with the same result. The next time you or your organization makes a reactive personnel decision under pressure, ask yourself honestly: what problem are you actually trying to solve?

Jesse Marsch and Canada’s First World Cup Win

One of the host nations, Canada, won their first ever World Cup match this past week in a game versus Qatar that was full of drama.

Two red cards, a horrific leg break, six goals, confrontations after the final whistle, all in front of a packed house of Canadians in Vancouver, BC.

In a move that has been lauded by some, and ridiculed by others, Jesse brought his squad out onto the pitch after the game for a team talk. He has stated previously his desire to create a “soccer” culture in Canada but given the backlash the question has been asked if this was the way to do it.

I’ve watched football for 20 years and can count the number of times a coach has done something like this on one hand. It felt more Ted Lasso than real football and begs the question on what is the value of public versus private culture building.

There is a version of what Jesse did that makes complete sense. The moment was historic, the crowd was still there, and if you believe culture is built in shared experience then that pitch was as good a setting as you’re going to get. But the moment also had an audience, and any time culture building has an audience you have to ask yourself who it is really for.

The locker room version of that same talk would have been private, unfiltered, and impossible to ridicule. What was gained by moving it outside, and what was lost?

Jesse’s team talk on that pitch divided the football world. But would the exact same words, said in a locker room with no cameras and no crowd, have landed differently with the players who actually needed to hear them?

Luis de la Fuente and Managing High Expectations

Spain are my favorites going into the tournament, and after a less than convincing 0-0 draw against Capo Verde to start the tournament, that hadn’t changed for me.

But the media, and many fans went into panic mode, reminiscent of the kind of panic that led to Tunisia sacking their manager.

Less than a week later, the communication about and around Spain is back to normal after a convincing 4-0 win against Saudi Arabia. Spain’s manager, Luis de la Fuente didn’t mince words in his press conference afterwards.

De la Fuente is one who knows the Spanish football system and pressure that comes with it well from his years as a player and now having coached various of Spain’s national teams over the last 13 years.

He and his squad are using the criticism early in the tournament as fuel, and it is eerily similar to how Argentina started their tournament back in 2022, one that they ended up winning.

“We live in a bubble, but criticism motivates us because we have very competitive footballers,” De la Fuente told reporters on Saturday. “And everything that has been said about us, and I’m not really paying attention to this, although some things I do hear here and there so you never know what I know or I don’t know, but this might have an impact on footballers.”

Thirteen years inside a national football system gives you a particular kind of steadiness. De la Fuente has been through enough cycles of Spanish football to know that the panic after one poor result is as predictable as the praise after a convincing one. The media pendulum swings. The players are watching to see if the coach swings with it.

Staying grounded when the environment is losing its mind is a skill most coaches underestimate because it is invisible when it works. Nobody writes about the coach who refused to panic. They write about the coach who changed everything after one bad result and either saved or sank the season.

Spain went from media villain to tournament favorites in under a week without De la Fuente changing a single thing about how he worked. Your athletes are watching how you respond to that same kind of noise. What are they actually seeing?

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

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Principle: Would Toni Nadal Get Hired Today?

My wife and I watched the Nadal documentary on Netflix this week. As a tennis fan back in the days of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic, it was a fun trip down memory lane. As a student of coaching and high performance, it was an engrossing, thought provoking watch.

Toni Nadal coached Rafael from childhood until 2017. His uncle. The man who handed him a racquet when he was four years old, made him play left-handed to develop a forehand that would become the most feared shot in tennis, and built, over twenty years, the most mentally durable competitor the sport has ever produced.

Watching Toni coach is uncomfortable in a specific way. He is demanding. Relentless is probably the more accurate word. He doesn’t celebrate victories the way a modern coach would. He redirects immediately to what’s still missing, what needs to be sharper, what the next standard is. He is on record saying he was always careful never to tell Rafael he was the best player in the world. Telling him he’d arrived, he believed, was the fastest way to slow him down.

You watch it and one question keeps surfacing. Would Toni get hired today?

Perspective: Old School Coaching vs. The Positive Psychology Swing

The performance coaching conversation has moved hard in one direction over the last decade. Psychological safety. Positive reinforcement. Player-led environments. Servant leadership. Trauma-informed practice.

These aren’t wrong. Some of them are overdue corrections to genuinely damaging coaching cultures.

But the conversation has started to quietly lose something. The understanding that high expectations, honest feedback, and a coach who doesn’t soften the truth are not automatically harmful. That some of what gets built in an athlete is built through friction, not comfort.

Carlos Moya replaced Toni in 2017. He is a brilliant coach. More collaborative, more peer-like, more technical in the modern sense. The relationship with Rafa shifted. Rafa at 31 needed something different than Rafa at 16. Moya provided it, and the results continued at an extraordinary level. Two more French Open titles. More major finals. A career that shouldn’t have been possible given the injury history.

Both men contributed to one of the greatest athletic careers in history. At different stages. In different ways. The question is whether we’ve decided that Moya’s model is the only acceptable one and quietly ruled Toni’s out.

Story: The Career That Shouldn’t Have Been Possible

Nadal’s medical history is not incidental to his greatness. It is central to it.

He has Müller-Weiss syndrome, a degenerative bone disease in his feet that causes chronic and sometimes severe pain. His knees have been operated on multiple times. His wrists. His abdomen. There have been stretches across his career where the medical staff around him were not confident he should be on court at all, let alone competing at the level he was competing at.

He won the 2009 Australian Open managing significant knee issues. He returned from career-threatening injuries more times than most players face in a healthy career. He won his 14th French Open title at Roland Garros in 2022 while his chronic foot condition was serious enough that nerve-blocking injections were part of his match preparation. He told the press afterward that he didn’t know what the long-term cost to his body would be. He went out and won the tournament anyway.

The Nadal documentary quietly forces a question that the coaching world rarely asks directly. What built that?

Toni did not coach a healthy athlete toward excellence. He coached someone whose body was, at various points, failing him, and built in that person a capacity to compete at the absolute limit of what a human frame can endure. The mental architecture came first. The willingness to tolerate discomfort, to treat pain as a condition to be managed rather than a signal to stop, to compete without any guarantee the body would hold.

A coaching philosophy centred on an athlete’s comfort and emotional safety is a reasonable approach for a healthy athlete. The honest question is whether it produces what Toni produced in someone whose body gave them reasons to stop at nearly every stage of their career.

I don’t know the answer with certainty. I suspect nobody does. But it’s a question worth asking, especially in a coaching culture that has largely stopped asking it.

Question:

Think about the coach who had the most lasting impact on your development. Not the one you liked most. The one whose voice still shows up when things get hard.

What did they do that a modern hiring committee might flag as a problem?

Closing Thought:

There is room for Toni and room for Moya in high performance. The best coaches understand this without needing to articulate it. They know when an athlete needs friction and when they need steadiness. They know when the honest word is what the moment calls for.

The problem is an industry that has spent a decade building the case for one approach and using it to discredit the other. The coaches doing the most important early developmental work, building the foundation that later coaches inherit, are operating in an environment that has decided their methods are a liability.

Some of them deserve that criticism. But not all of them. And we should probably be honest about what we lose when we stop making room for the ones who don’t.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

When talking about leadership, there are few better places to reference than World War 2. And as coaches, we should be drawing inspiration from everywhere, other industries, history, other sports, it doesn’t matter. So today will be one part leadership, one part history lesson.

May 28, 1940. The British War Cabinet. Lord Halifax had a case. The army was trapped at Dunkirk, France was collapsing, and a negotiated peace through Mussolini was, he argued, the responsible path. Churchill heard him out. Then he refused.

He didn’t just push back in the cabinet room. He went around Halifax entirely, calling a meeting of the full outer cabinet and told them plainly where he stood. He said he had considered whether it was his duty to enter negotiations with “That Man.” He said it would mean becoming a slave state. Then he told them: “If this long island story of ours is to end, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

His colleagues cheered. They were with him to a man.

What the cabinet needed that afternoon wasn’t inspiration. It was someone willing to say the thing most of the room was hoping would dissolve on its own, and say it with conviction.

This is a leadership skill you can develop. It has nothing to do with being naturally bold or built for confrontation. It’s a practiced willingness to step into the conversation the room has quietly agreed to avoid.

The coaches who develop this skill tend to have rooms that trust them. The ones who don’t tend to have rooms that are polite in the wrong moments.

Perspective: The Quieter Form of Avoidance

When I ask coaches where they lose their nerve, the answers come quickly.

The star performer who’s been underdelivering but is too valuable to upset. The staff meeting where one person dominates and everyone else goes quiet. The assistant who’s technically excellent but eroding the culture, and nobody will name it because they’ve been there too long.

The avoidance is rarely cowardice. It’s something quieter. An accumulated sense that harmony in the room is more manageable than whatever comes after the honest conversation. And that logic isn’t entirely wrong. Hard conversations are uncomfortable. They create friction. Sometimes they go badly.

What they almost never do is make things worse than silence does.

The people you lead are watching. They notice when something should have been said and wasn’t. They see the standard that got quietly lowered. They feel the moment the leader blinked. Over time, they adjust their own behavior to match the standard they actually observe, not the one written in the team handbook.

Avoiding the hard conversation isn’t neutral. It teaches the room something, and rarely what you intended.

Story: Rommel, Hitler, and the Argument That Cost Germany Normandy

By early 1944, Rommel had made up his mind about how to defend Normandy. He wanted the Panzer divisions at the coast to stop the Allies at the waterline before Allied air power could pin the armor inland. His counterpart, Geyr von Schweppenburg, commander of Armored Group West, disagreed completely. Hold the Panzers in reserve near Paris, strike in concentrated force once the direction of the landing was confirmed.

On March 19, 1944, Rommel went to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Obersalzberg to make his case. He tried to broaden the conversation beyond tactics, to speak about what Germany was actually facing. Hitler slammed his fist on the table and ordered him to stick to military matters. Rommel pushed back twice. He was dismissed from Hitler’s presence.

Hitler’s solution was a compromise that satisfied no one. He split the Panzer divisions between Army Group B and OKW reserve, keeping the most powerful divisions under his personal control, requiring his direct authorization before they could move. On June 6, when the landings began, Hitler was asleep. His staff didn’t wake him for hours. By the time the armored divisions were released, Allied air power and the delay had made a coordinated counterattack impossible. The beach defense was overwhelmed. Rommel’s assessment proved correct in almost every detail.

The point is not that saying the right thing guarantees the outcome. It doesn’t. What it does is ensure the leader has done the actual job. Leaders need to communicate clearly what they see, hold the standard publicly, go on record before the moment of decision rather than after.

Leaders who say what needs to be said sometimes get overruled. Leaders who don’t say it don’t get overruled. They get managed. And their rooms learn to manage them back.

Question:

Think about the last time you stayed quiet when you shouldn’t have.

What was the real cost of that silence to the people in the room with you?

Closing Thought:

Churchill said what the room was hoping he wouldn’t.

Rommel told Hitler he was wrong, twice, to his face.

Neither one was thanked for it.

The leaders your people remember are the ones who said the thing.

The question is whether you’re building that habit or avoiding it.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

Pep Guardiola is leaving Manchester City.

A decade. Six league titles. A Champions League. A historic treble. 20 major trophies in total.

What he built matters. What he showed coaches matters more.

1. Hire for wisdom, not just expertise

When Guardiola took the Barcelona job in 2008, one of his first calls wasn’t to a tactical coach. It was to Manel Estiarte.

Estiarte had won Olympic gold in water polo. One of the greatest players his sport had ever produced. No football background. No coaching licence. No experience in the professional game.

Guardiola brought him in as something between a people manager and a cultural anchor. His job: understand where each player was emotionally. Be the trusted figure between the dressing room and the manager.

Estiarte followed him to Bayern Munich. Then to Manchester City. Eighteen years on the same staff.

The coaching world spends enormous energy on tactical innovation. Guardiola invested in the emotional architecture of his squads before that language existed.

2. Study the game before you inherit it

Between retiring as a player in 2006 and taking the Barcelona B job in 2007, Guardiola spent a year in Argentina and Mexico.

Watching football. Reading the game. Building a philosophy from scratch, without a squad to apply it to.

He returned knowing exactly what he wanted to build and why. The job came second. The thinking came first.

Most coaches get the role and then start figuring out what they believe. Guardiola had already done that work.

3. Remove the untouchables before the team does it for you

In his first week at Barcelona, Guardiola sat down with Ronaldinho and Deco and told them they were free to leave.

Ronaldinho had won the Ballon d’Or four years earlier. Deco was a Champions League winner. Both still commanded genuine respect in the dressing room. Neither was in the kind of visible decline that would have given Guardiola an obvious justification.

He acted anyway.

He did the same at Manchester City with Yaya Touré. One of the most dominant midfielders of his generation, central to the club’s first title. By the time Touré was being systematically excluded, the squad understood why. The standard had been established well before it needed to be applied to him.

The culture you want to build cannot have exemptions. The harder the conversation, the earlier you have to have it.

4. Reinvent the players you already have

When Guardiola arrived at Bayern Munich in 2013, Philipp Lahm was one of the best left backs in the world. Within months, he was playing as a defensive midfielder.

No gradual transition. Guardiola gave him the role and expected him to grow into it. Lahm later described it as the hardest and most rewarding adaptation of his career.

Sergio Busquets was in Barcelona’s B team when Guardiola promoted him directly to the first squad. The conventional assessment: too slow, too limited athletically. Guardiola saw that his positional intelligence made physical speed almost irrelevant. He was always in the right place before he needed to move. He became the most important player in the most successful club side of the era.

Xabi Alonso had already won everything in the game when he arrived at Bayern. Guardiola turned him into a deep-lying playmaker. Alonso arguably became better in his mid-thirties than he had been in his twenties.

Lahm, Busquets, Alonso, Stones, Nunes, Fàbregas.

In each case, Guardiola saw the player’s next version before the player did.

5. The standard never negotiates

No one was exempt. Senior players, decorated players, players who had proved everything they needed to prove.

Guardiola dropped players based on training performance. His “if you don’t press, you don’t play” applied to everyone, in every session.

Tuesdays in November carried the same weight as Champions League semi-finals.

Most high-performance environments have quiet exceptions. Players who are beyond certain conversations, above certain standards. Guardiola dissolved that over time through consistency rather than confrontation.

6. Create certainty inside complexity

Guardiola’s systems are genuinely complex. The positional demands, the pressing triggers, the rotations, the movement patterns that shift depending on where the ball is. The cognitive load on his players is high.

His answer to that complexity is precision at the individual level. Players don’t need to understand the whole. They need to understand their own part exactly.

Kevin De Bruyne has spoken about how specifically Guardiola communicated with him. Not general guidance. Reference to exact movements, specific moments in the match, the precise position required in a given zone.

A demanding system doesn’t have to produce anxiety. When each person knows their piece exactly, it tends to produce confidence instead.

7. Read the room before you address it

Before Guardiola spoke to the squad after a match, Estiarte moved through the dressing room.

His job in those first minutes was to read. To understand where each player was, what the room needed, before anyone tried to address it.

By the time Guardiola walked in, he already knew.

His own description, repeated across multiple interviews: he doesn’t speak to a group. He speaks to a collection of individuals who happen to be in the same room. What they need from him depends entirely on where they are.

8. Make training the hardest thing they do

This is a theme across the great coaches — Wooden, Walsh, Guardiola.

Kevin De Bruyne said it. Bernardo Silva said it. Phil Foden said it independently, in separate interviews.

Games felt easier than training.

Guardiola designed it that way. Sessions were harder, more demanding, and more pressurised than any competitive match.

When the preparation environment consistently exceeds what performance requires, the match becomes manageable by comparison. Players arrive having already been in harder situations that week.

9. Know when the work is done

Guardiola left Barcelona in 2012. The results were still good. He left because he had given what he had to give, and he knew it.

He left Bayern with four consecutive Bundesliga titles.

He told Manchester City he would leave at the end of a season in which they won a domestic double.

The pattern across all three clubs: he left while the work was still good. Before the results began to reflect a manager whose best thinking was behind him.

Most coaches stay until the environment forces the decision. Guardiola tracks the state of his own engagement, whether he still has something new to offer. When that signal changes, he acts on it.

10. Use defeat as the brief

After Manchester City lost the 2021 Champions League final to Chelsea, Guardiola had started without a recognised holding midfielder. The decision was widely criticised and thoroughly analysed.

He didn’t respond publicly. He didn’t revisit the decision in press.

He used it.

City’s defensive structure changed significantly in the following pre-season. The way they managed transitions, the personnel in certain positions, the depth in those areas. The defeat had become a design document.

The same happened after the 2019 Champions League exit to Liverpool. The specific ways Liverpool created overloads in transition directly influenced how City restructured their pressing approach the following year.

Two common responses to a significant loss: explain it away, or change everything. Guardiola demonstrates a third. Study what specifically failed. Extract what specifically needs to change. Apply it precisely.

Guardiola is not a replicable phenomenon. What he had access to across those years won’t come together in exactly that form again.

But the list above says almost nothing about the players.

It’s about who he hired, when he left, how he prepared, and what he did when he lost.

Which of those are choices available to you right now?

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

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I finished reading John Wooden’s *Pyramid of Success* this week.

Wooden joined the Navy in 1943. Spent three years as a physical trainer for combat pilots during World War II. A man who understood, in a very literal sense, what it meant to prepare people for high-stakes performance.

And yet the philosophy he built wasn’t about aggression. It wasn’t about defeating the opponent.

At the very top of his Pyramid sits Competitive Greatness. His definition: “Having a real love for the hard battle, knowing it offers the opportunity to be at your best when your best is required.”

Not winning. Not defeating. A love for the hard battle.

I’ll be honest with you. I am not a natural fighter. Whether in business, on the field, or in my relationships, competition doesn’t come easily to me. It’s one of the things I’m actively working on. I’ve always been surrounded by fighters, so I know what it looks like and I admire it in others.

Wooden’s definition changed something for me. Because fighting on those terms is something I can learn. And I think most coaches can.

Perspective: The Kind of Fight Coaches Avoid

A lot of coaches confuse fighting with confrontation.

They think being a fighter means being the loudest or most forceful person in the room. Because that doesn’t feel like them, they decide they’re not fighters at all.

You might think the coaches who struggle to fight are the ones who lack confidence. In my experience, they’re usually the ones who care the most. They know what’s at stake. They feel the risk clearly. And that’s precisely why they pull back at the moment presence is most needed.

Real competitive fight doesn’t look like aggression. It looks like submitting the proposal when you’re not sure it’s ready. Having the conversation you’ve been avoiding for three weeks. Staying in the room when the room gets uncomfortable. Holding your standard when someone with more authority pushes back.

None of that requires a personality transplant. All of it requires a choice.

Wooden’s insight is that fighting is a skill, not a temperament. It can be taught. It can be built. And it starts with learning to respect the hard battle rather than hoping it passes.

Story: How Wooden Coached Fight

Wooden almost never mentioned the other team.

In 27 seasons at UCLA, ten national championships, his pre-game speeches weren’t about the opponent’s weaknesses. There were no scouting reports dominating practice. The other team was largely irrelevant to his preparation.

What he talked about was being at your best when your best was required.

His practices were, by every account, the hardest thing his players ever did. Not games. Practices. Bill Walton described them as relentless. Wooden engineered an environment where the fight happened every single day, long before anyone showed up to watch.

By the time UCLA reached a final, the players had already been in harder battles that week.

That’s the coaching insight worth keeping. Wooden didn’t motivate players to fight in big moments. He built an environment that made fighting a daily habit. The championship moments were easy by comparison.

Question

Describe a time in your life when you fought a good fight but came in second.

How were you a winner in that situation?

Closing Thought

Wooden won ten championships and barely mentioned the opponent.

The fight he was preparing his players for was always against themselves. Their own complacency, their preference for comfort, their willingness to give less than their best when no one was watching.

That’s the fight worth coaching.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

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At the start of this year, one of my mentors asked me to do something uncomfortable.

He suggested I go to the people closest to me — family, friends, colleagues — and ask them a simple question: what behaviours and actions should I continue, and which ones should I stop?

This wasn’t a performance review. It was a character audit.

It’s an exposing exercise. The people in your life who know you well enough to answer that question honestly are also the ones who see past the professional version of you. They’re not evaluating your methodology. They’re evaluating your integrity. Your patterns. The gap between who you say you are and how you actually show up.

What I got back was useful in ways that no credential or framework has ever been.

I’m going to do this at least yearly, one could do it more frequently. It should be standard practice for coaches.

We build feedback loops for our athletes. We track output, review performance, create structured opportunities for honest assessment — for everyone except ourselves.

The character audit flips that. It asks: who are you becoming, not just what are you producing? Are the people who know you best seeing the same person you believe yourself to be?

Most coaches I work with have never asked that question seriously. They’ve invested heavily in becoming technically excellent — and left the foundations of who they are largely unexamined.

Perspective: The Credential Trap

Here’s what the credential trap looks like:

A coach invests heavily in becoming technically excellent. They study the science. They understand load management, periodisation, recovery, cognitive performance. They’re sought after because of what they know.

And then pressure arrives — from a club, an athlete, a sponsor, an outcome — and the question they face isn’t a technical one.

It’s an ethical one.

Do you hold the line, or do you find a way to justify crossing it?

Technical mastery gives you nothing in that moment. What determines your answer is character — the accumulated weight of the person you’ve been becoming, quietly, in the decisions nobody was watching.

The coaches who end careers, damage athletes, and leave lasting harm in performance environments are rarely incompetent. Most are highly skilled. They know exactly what they’re doing.

What they lacked wasn’t knowledge. It was the integrity to use it well.

Story: Alberto Salazar and the Cost of Winning Without Character

Alberto Salazar was one of the most decorated distance coaches in modern sport. At the 2012 London Olympics, two of his athletes — Mo Farah and Galen Rupp — finished first and second in the 10,000 metres. He won the IAAF Coaching Achievement Award in 2013. By any conventional measure, he was at the peak of the profession.

Behind that record, something else was being built.

In 2019, the US Anti-Doping Agency found that Salazar had trafficked testosterone, administered a prohibited IV infusion, and attempted to tamper with doping controls, all while acting as head coach of the Nike Oregon Project. The programme was shut down. His ban was later made permanent.

But it was the testimony from his own athletes that cut deepest.

Former athlete Mary Cain alleged that she had suffered years of emotional and physical abuse — that she was pressured to take illegal diuretics and shamed about her weight to the point of self-harm and suicidal thoughts. Several former Oregon Project athletes came forward to validate her account.

USADA’s conclusion was direct: Salazar demonstrated that winning was more important than the health and wellbeing of the athletes he was sworn to protect.

This is what craft without character produces.

Not always this visibly. Not always this catastrophically. But the dynamic is the same at every level — a highly competent person who never did the work of interrogating their own values, their relationship with power, their willingness to protect the people in their care when it was inconvenient.

Salazar didn’t lack knowledge. He lacked the character to use it in service of others rather than outcomes.

Question

You’re investing in your craft. That’s good.

But when did you last seriously examine who you’re becoming as a person — not as a practitioner?

Closing Thought

The industry will keep rewarding credentials. That’s not changing.

But credentials don’t tell you what a coach does when the pressure is on and no one is watching. They don’t tell you how a coach treats an athlete who is struggling, inconvenient, or in the way of a result.

That’s a character question. And it’s the one that actually matters.

The coaches I respect most are not the most credentialed people in the room. They’re the ones who have done the harder, quieter work of figuring out who they are.

Build the craft. But don’t neglect the person doing the building.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

Back on the local soccer pitch this week.

We’ve all coached that player. The one who cares more than everyone else — more than the score sometimes. When they’re channelled, they’re a weapon. When they’re not, they’re a liability.

One bad call. One crunching challenge. One tactical decision they disagree with.

And suddenly you’re managing a situation rather than coaching a game.

In high-performance sport, there’s a useful frame for this: the idea of the red head and the blue head.

Red head is the reactive, emotionally charged state — impulse without direction. Blue head is composed, clear, purposeful — still competitive, still intense, but in control of the next action.

The goal isn’t to eliminate the red head. These players are often your most competitive, most committed — and that edge is worth protecting.

The goal is to give them a bridge back to blue.

Perspective: It’s Not a Character Problem

The mistake most coaches make with these players is treating the reaction as a character issue.

“He’s too hot-headed.” “She can’t handle pressure.” “We need someone more composed.”

What they’re describing is an absence of structure — not an absence of character. A fiery player who reacts badly to a bad call hasn’t failed a personality test. They’ve never been given a repeatable process to run when it matters.

The difference between elite environments and the rest isn’t that their players don’t go red. It’s that those players have a script for what to do when they do.

Not suppression. Structure.

Story: Gilbert Enoka and the All Blacks’ Microstructure

Gilbert Enoka — mental skills coach with the All Blacks for over two decades — worked with some of the most competitive athletes in world rugby. Players wired, by design, to fight.

In Become Unstoppable, he describes the moment he asked a few of his more fiery players to rate their mindset when a referee called a decision against them — one being calm, ten being nuclear.

“Well, I usually want to punch them in the head,” said one player. “So… an eleven.”

Enoka introduced a simple microstructure for those flashpoint moments. The player’s response was immediate.

“Bert, that’s bullshit.”

He tried it anyway.

Step 1: Walk away from the official.

Step 2: Connect with the nearest teammate. Ask one question: What are you seeing?

Step 3: Assess the situation, draw breath, move onto the next task.

Three steps. A few seconds. Non-negotiable.

Not designed to make them feel better. Designed to give the brain something to do before the emotion made the decision for them.

After the next match, the player scored his flashpoint moments at a 6 or 7.

Down from eleven.

He didn’t become less competitive. He became more effective at exactly the moments that cost teams the most.

Question:

Think about the red heads in your environment.

Do they have a structure for those moments — or are you hoping they’ll find their way back to blue on their own?

Closing Thought:

You can’t coach composure in the moment it’s needed.

You build the structure before it is.

A microstructure isn’t therapy. It’s preparation.

The reactive player doesn’t need a different personality.

They need something to do.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

I was talking with my friend Cody Royle recently. He’s a former international head coach, author of three books, and one of the more serious thinkers working in performance right now.

We were talking about professional development — specifically, where coaches should focus their time and money when it comes to levelling up.

He mentioned Seth Godin’s alt MBA. Which he did while he was a head coach.

On paper, that looks strange. You’re running a national programme. You’re managing a roster, a staff, a results environment. And you’re doing a creative writing MBA run by an internet marketer.

But his reasons were simple: curiosity, creative challenge, finishing a book. It paid off, including finding an editor he’s worked with across all three books, and a new network of thinkers from completely different fields.

None of that was on the syllabus.

Which raises a question the industry doesn’t ask enough: what actually counts as professional development for a coach?

Perspective: The Credential Trap

We’ve been trained to think about professional development in a narrow way.

A certification. An accreditation. A university course with a recognisable name on it. Something with a score and a badge at the end.

Those things have value. I’m not dismissing them. But coaching is, at its core, a study of humans. Behaviour. Change. Motivation. Pressure. Decision-making. Trust.

Any education that deepens your understanding of those things is coaching education.

A peer leadership group of six people wrestling with real organisational problems. A book you’re writing about something you don’t fully understand yet. An industry entirely different from sport. A creative challenge that forces you to think differently.

All of it counts.

The question isn’t “is this an accredited coaching course?” The question is: “does this make me sharper at understanding and developing people?”

If the answer is yes, it belongs in your development plan.

Story: Cody’s Best Answer

At one point, I asked Cody what he thought the single best professional development opportunity was for a performance coach.

I expected a book. A programme. Maybe a mentor he’d worked with.

He said: parenting.

“Hands down, without a doubt. There is absolutely nothing that teaches you more about behaviour, behaviour change, skill development, and skill acquisition than watching your own child develop.”

I’ve got three kids. I knew exactly what he meant.

Decision-making under pressure happens every morning before 8am. Making a clear, shared decision with another key decision-maker (your partner) while three children are screaming for different things simultaneously: that’s a skill set no seminar touches.

The best development often doesn’t arrive in the form you’re looking for. It comes disguised as life.

Question

Think back over the last 12 months of professional development — time, money, or both.

How much of it sharpened your understanding of people, not just your technical practice?

Closing Thought

The credential validates a narrow slice. Everything else is your responsibility. Coaching is a study of humans. That means life itself is curriculum. The question is whether you’re treating it that way.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

I play in a recreational soccer league every week. We just played the best team in the league. It was a tense match, and I noticed that the more pressure mounted, the more our communication defaulted to what was going wrong. Mistakes were pointed out. Frustration was audible. More tension. More mistakes.

Nobody chose it. Pressure just narrowed what we noticed, and what we said.

That pattern isn’t unique to recreational football. It’s the default in most coaching environments. And it has a cost.

Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy — one of the most replicated bodies of research in performance psychology — identified verbal affirmation from a credible source as one of the primary mechanisms by which athletes build belief in their own capability. Not just feel better. Build capability. In sport, few sources are more credible than the coach.

When you tell an athlete “that was right, do that again,” you aren’t just offering praise. You’re providing information. You’re telling them what to keep, and you’re building the belief that they can execute it when it counts.

Research backs this up: a recent study found that supportive coaching behaviours including constructive, affirming feedback, directly predicted athlete performance through increased self-efficacy and psychological safety, while controlling, correction-only approaches had the opposite effect.

The problem is that in high-stakes moments, exactly when affirmation matters most, pressure narrows communication to correction.

And what doesn’t get said has consequences too.

Perspective: Silence Isn’t Neutral

There’s a belief, often unspoken, that positive feedback is for beginners. That once someone is elite, they don’t need to be told they’re good. They should already know. Praise is for youth sport.

This is wrong.

Silence after good work isn’t neutrality. It’s a message. And the message is: that wasn’t worth noting.

In high-performance environments, athletes are already operating in a constant state of self-evaluation. They’re looking for signal in everything, including what you choose not to say. When a coach only speaks to correct, the athlete’s internal calculus becomes simple:

Feedback means I failed. No feedback means I barely got it right.

The cost isn’t just psychological. It’s behavioural. Athletes who aren’t told what to keep doing often stop doing it. The behaviour that earned silence gets quietly revised and replaced by something that at least produces a reaction.

You didn’t intend to coach them away from it. But you did.

Story: What Klopp Understood About Signal

In their early years at Liverpool, Klopp developed a reputation not for tactical complexity — other coaches matched him there — but for his ability to make elite players feel like the best version of themselves.

Those who’ve studied his approach describe a consistent pattern: Klopp would find three things you did right in a game where you made five mistakes. He didn’t ignore the mistakes. But he led with what worked.

The principle wasn’t naivety. It was strategic. When players feel capable, they attempt more. When they attempt more, they create more. When they create more, there’s more to correct, but there’s also more to build on.

Coaches who only correct are managing. Coaches who affirm and correct are developing and that compounds over a career.

Question:

Think about the last session you ran.

If I asked your athletes what they did well today, would they be able to tell me?

Closing Thought:

Correction tells someone what to change.

Affirmation tells them what to keep.

Both are coaching decisions.

The absence of one is a gap. Say what they did right. Mean it. Then raise the bar.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

Chris Voss spent decades negotiating hostage situations for the FBI. In Never Split the Difference, he makes a point that silence is not the absence of negotiation. It’s the negotiation.

When you go quiet after making a proposal, you create pressure without saying a word. The other person sits with the discomfort of an unanswered question. And humans are wired to resolve discomfort by talking — they explain, they soften, they reveal more than they intended to.

The research supports it. Studies on negotiation consistently show that silence after a proposal increases concession rates. The pause isn’t dead air. It’s the ask doing its work.

But coaches carry a specific handicap here.

We are conditioned to fill silence — with instruction, with encouragement, with the next cue. Silence in a performance environment can feel like absence, like we’ve stopped coaching. So when we walk into a contract conversation, a budget meeting, a difficult review, we bring that same reflex. We make the ask. We feel the gap open. And we close it ourselves — with qualifiers, with softening, with explanation — before the other person has had a chance to respond.

We talk ourselves out of leverage before they’ve said a word.

Perspective: Coaches Treat Silence Like a Problem

Watch most performance coaches handle a difficult conversation and you’ll see the same pattern.

They make the point. Then they keep going. Softening it. Qualifying it. Explaining it. Covering for it before the other person has had a chance to receive it.

The silence gets filled. The moment gets lost.

Rushing past the silence is almost always a tell, you’re not sure your point will hold up, so you crowd it with more words before the room can press back.

But the room doesn’t need more words. The room needs time. If you fill that space, you take that work away from them — and the conversation stays on the surface.

The coaches who carry the most authority in a room didn’t get there by having more to say. They got there by knowing when to stop.

Story: Bill Walsh and the Quiet Sideline

The NFL sideline is not a place built for silence. Coaches pace. They yell. They cover every possession with instruction. Noise is the default.

Bill Walsh didn’t fit the pattern. In The Score Takes Care of Itself, Walsh wrote that the head coach’s words carry such weight that spending them loosely erodes their value. He believed that filling silence for the sake of it cost more than it gained.

So he didn’t. Three Super Bowl titles. Two NFL Coach of the Year awards. A coaching tree that shaped the modern league for the next thirty years.

Walsh’s edge wasn’t that he talked more than other coaches. It was that he understood when not to. He used silence the way a good surgeon uses a scalpel — not as the main instrument, but as the one that decides whether the work holds.

Question:

Think about the last high-stakes conversation where you had something important to say.

Did you let your point sit? Or did you fill the space before the other person could feel the weight of it?

Closing Thought:

Most coaches rush the pause because it feels uncomfortable. The ones with authority know it’s where the point finishes working.

Let the silence do the work.

Until next week,

Caleb Cousens

Key Topics:

Transition from traditional sports to esports

Challenges of applying sports psychology in gaming

Networking strategies for coaches

Building a career without a clear path

Importance of relationships and trust in coaching

Time Stamps:

00:00 Introduction to High Performance Coaching

02:01 Jack's Journey from Rugby to Esports

04:49 University Decisions

12:41 Jack's First Job in High Performance

17:10 How to Network to Get a Job

20:09 Transitioning To Jack's First Paid Role

27:53 Lessons Learned in Esports Coaching

31:57 Key Habits for Success in Coaching

37:53 Closing Statements