8 min
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.
A coach refers a player who has 'lost confidence'. In the room it turns out the player is fine everywhere except in front of that coach, and the reason is that this coach takes people apart in front of the squad on Tuesdays. That is not a confidence problem. Selling that player mental skills training would be taking money to make an environment problem look like a personal defect.
This is not an accusation and most coaches who hear it take it well, because it is also useful: a squad that cannot make mistakes in training will not take risks on Saturday, and you were probably already wondering why they play smaller than they train. The fix is not softness. It is that the correction happens privately and the standard stays exactly where it was.
There is a version of this that runs the other way too. Some players are referred because they are difficult rather than because they are struggling, and a psychologist is being asked to make them compliant. I will not do that either, and I will tell you why in the same conversation.
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.
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.