5 min
You do not have to be in crisis to book
The most common sentence in a first session is that they nearly did not come because it did not feel bad enough to deserve it.
People wait years. Not because of the fee, and not really because of the stigma either — because booking means explaining, and explaining means saying out loud that something is wrong, and most athletes have spent a decade being rewarded for not saying that.
So they wait for it to get bad enough to justify the phone call, which means the first session happens at the worst possible moment, usually mid-season and usually after something has already gone wrong publicly. Almost everything I work with is considerably easier in October than in April.
There is no threshold. You do not have to be able to name it — seventeen out of the last hundred first sessions could not — and you do not have to justify it to me before you arrive. One line is enough, and the line can be 'I do not really know'.
The penalty is not where you think it is
It is decided in the walk, not the strike. Almost everything that can be trained about a penalty happens before you place the ball.
Your player is not fragile. Your environment might be.
For coaches. Some of what gets referred to me as a mindset problem is a coaching problem, and I am going to say so.