Show Notes
I came across Adam Nicholls on LinkedIn and his posts kept stopping me. Short clips of Klopp, Popovich, Steve Kerr - with Adam quietly unpacking the psychology of what they're actually doing. Not tactics, not systems. The human stuff. Care, compassion, what it looks like to genuinely back the people you coach. So I reached out and invited him on to the podcast. Professor of Sport and Exercise Psychology at the University of Hull, over 85 published papers, three books including Psychology in Sports Coaching. And outside of all that, a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu who competes at the British Open and uses his own experiences of standing in a competitive bullpen waiting to be called to the mat to test the psychology he researches.
Three Key Messages 1. Tough and compassionate aren't opposites This came up early and kept coming back. Adam posts a lot about coaches like Popovich, Saban and Ferguson - coaches with reputations for being hard, demanding, sometimes brutal. And what sits underneath that, consistently, is genuine love for the people they coach. Adam's point is simple. You don't get to choose between creating a tough environment and creating a caring one. The best coaches do both at the same time. A coach who doesn't care enough to challenge their athletes isn't being kind - they're just being easy.
2. The closeness finding In a study of over 200 athletes, he and his colleagues found that the closer the coach-athlete relationship, the more pressure an athlete can feel not to let their coach down. The relationship itself becomes an added stressor. Think about it like this - having your best friend watch you parallel park is harder than doing it in front of a stranger. The care makes the stakes feel higher. Adam's answer isn't to back off and keep your distance. It's to name it. Tell your athletes explicitly - your relationship with me has nothing to do with how you perform today. I'm in your corner regardless.
3. Coping is a skill Adam's research on what effective coping actually looks like is full of useful ideas. Ineffective coping - speeding up your routine to escape the moment, withdrawing from the game, just stopping trying - is more common than you'd think even at the highest level. Effective coping looks like slowing down, logically working through what's happening, using visualisation, breathing properly. None of this is complicated. But most athletes don't do it deliberately, and that's exactly the gap a good coach can close.
Coach Logic Really pleased to share that the podcast is developing a partnership with Coach Logic. From future episodes onwards the partnership means real coaching challenges to try out between episodes, and conversations with coaches who've been paying attention to how they coach and what they've noticed when they do. More details coming very soon. Find out more about Coach Logic here: https://www.coach-logic.com
Get in Touch Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/ Coach Logic: https://www.coach-logic.com
Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/professor-adam-nicholls-77453b20b/
More from Game Plan Coaching Podcast
This is the final episode of series two, and it's a fitting way to close things out. Rather than a single coaching idea or a piece of research, this conversation zooms out to look at the systems and structures that sit behind coach learning and development. Tom Causer is National Coach Education Manager at Badminton Ireland, originally from High Wycombe and now based in Moira in Northern Ireland. He works across an all-island governing body covering everyone from volunteer grassroots coaches through to coaches working with Olympic players. He is currently leading a number of ambitious projects to transform how coaches in badminton learn, grow and feel supported, and the thinking behind it is well worth borrowing whatever sport you work in.
Stephen Maxwell is a man who wears a lot of hats, and wears them well. Coach and Match Official Education Manager at Cricket Ireland, director of coaching across four Gaelic Games codes, founder of No Other Game Around Performance Consultants, and a researcher whose MSc thesis at the University of Limerick was titled Do Coaches Fill Their Own Cups. He completed that degree with first-class honours, and his research on self-care in coaching is something he now shares with coaches and organisations across sport and business. He started coaching at 14, has worked across multiple sports and multiple countries, and brings a warmth and practicality to this topic that makes it feel useful rather than abstract.
Rob Gray is a Professor of Human Systems Engineering at Arizona State University and host of the brilliant Perception and Action Podcast. With over 25 years of experience he has worked with elite sports teams including MLB and NBA franchises, and is the author of How We Learn to Move, How to Be an Ecological Coach, and Learning to Optimize Movement. He's one of the biggest names going in ecological dynamics and the constraints-led approach, and has this rare gift of taking genuinely dense science and making it sound like the most obvious thing in the world. His main applied sport is baseball, though his work spans golf, tennis, driving, cycling and even martial arts.
Mark Cairns and Andy Muir are the co-founders of Coach Logic, calling in from their bothy in Edinburgh - which, for anyone not from Scotland, is a shelter in the mountains. They haven't climbed a literal mountain to get there, but the metaphor isn't a bad one for what they're trying to do. Both rugby. Mark is a coach educator for World Rugby across Europe and comes from a PE teaching background. Andy has lectured in sports science at Edinburgh College. They built Coach Logic because coaches have no consistent way of knowing what they actually do when they coach. This conversation is about finding a solution to that - and it's a really good one.
Jen Coe is an HCPC Registered Sport Psychologist, Senior Lead for Workforce Development at the Football Association, and someone who has spent 25 years in sport from playground to podium. Before the FA she worked at UK Coaching supporting coaches across 13 high performance Olympic sports, and prior to that as Performance Wellbeing Lead in the WSL. She is a former international basketball player, and co-author of four books with the brilliant Amy Whitehead. Jen is a good friend and a former colleague at UK Coaching, where she inspired me every day.