Tools and Techniques Used by an Emotional Agility and Mind Coach in Football

by Mike Conway

Over the years, I have employed a huge number of techniques and approaches at different times when working with individuals and teams in elite sport and business.. Basket one are those that have been formally studied and learned over many years. A second basket are those that have been obtained through knowledge sharing with some wonderful like-minded people. A third basket are personal techniques that have emerged over many years’ experience.  

Whilst not exhaustive, tools include:

anchoring; attitude and belief strategies; body language analytics; communication patterns and modalities; cbt; counselling; EQ and resilience improvement strategies; experiential team and learning programs ; hypnotherapy; language management assessments and development; leadership models and principles; mindfulness; negative emotion reframing neuro leadership principles of goal setting; neurolinguistics; parallaxology; past regression; positive psychology programs; relationship strategies; risk management and decision making; strategic psychotherapy, thankful and grateful programs.

Let's dig a little deeper into some of the above...

Decision-Making and Risk Management

Have you ever really assessed what your decision-making process is? Every day we make decisions. Sometimes we have plenty of time and sometimes not. 

In elite sport, fast-acting
 decisions are often the difference between 
winning and losing. One of the techniques I have 
used is the application of perceptual-cognitive 
training- based computer models. 

I have used 
these essentially in soccer to help speed up
reaction times which then provides a little more
time for decisions to be made on the field. As an
example, I am currently using this with one
young footballer to prepare him for a number of
high profile trials in England.
I have found mind mapping and risk management techniques are useful for highly structured people to enable them to identify priorities for improvement and set goals. Using ISO 31000 as a basis for the identification, categorisation and treatment of activities and risks has helped a number of individuals and teams determine where to start on their improvement strategies and reduce the overwhelm factor.

“Parallaxology"

The best sports teams now have sophisticated analytical tools which can help individuals understand their performance, however the parallaxology approach provides an effective extra dimension. Building media through different camera lenses to find the best perspective is part of XVenture’s day to day work (eg XVenture TV show) but it’s not what everybody is trained to do or finds easy. There is an Elvis Presley track called “Walk a mile in My Shoes.”!

The words are extremely poignant. In essence, I developed “parallaxology” tools to help individuals to build skills to enable them to do just this, improving their own performance after an effective but non-judgmental review of different perspectives. It helps reduce negative future expectancy from analysing mistakes and focuses on the most significant improvements.


This was an excerpt originally published as part of the article "The Application and Results of EQ & Mental Coaching Techniques."

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