The Emotionally Intelligent Coach, Team and League
In the coming days and weeks I will be publishing a series of articles about Emotional Intelligence (EI) aimed at those who are involved in youth football.
The aim of the information I will be putting out there is to offer a realistic view on how we develop young footballers, and the environment we do that work in from the EI standpoint.
It goes without saying that the huge numbers of people who give their time up for training sessions, matches, league administration or refereeing are good people.They have the love of football at their hearts and want to give kids the chance to play the sport they love.
But it is also true that society moves on and in some places the old ways of football have remained stubbornly in place, unbending in the face of educational changes that others see in full 1080 HD clarity. These changes include EI and its importance.
What I will be discussing has been in place in the education sector for many years, indeed it has been accepted as proven and necessary for longer than the Football Association has been traveling the world developing their excellent proposals for youth football.
All of what I will be talking about has one main thrust, to put the kids and their needs at the centre of everything we do in youth football.
I fully accept that lots of you who will have already read the information I put out and will see it as familiar and ‘the norm’. But there will also be people for whom the ideas seem strange and new.
Whichever person you are the desire on my part is to help create a footballing community that values Emotional Intelligence and can audit itself against the same requirements that schools do.
In primary schools Emotional Intelligence is known as S.E.A.L (Social Emotional Aspects of Learning) and is also found in education in the QCA’s P.L.T.S (Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills) and it is now embedded in the way that schools engage with young people in their care.
The same values and principles are in place for Youth Services all across the country.
The simple premise in all of this is that young people are more ready and able to learn if they are happy with the environment in which they are taught.
Likewise those who teach find it easier and more rewarding to do so when pupils are ready and able to learn.
It soon becomes a virtuous circle of teaching becoming more effective for the kids who learn more, and then want to learn more, making the teaching more enjoyable.
Of course we can all think of many examples where this doesn’t/hasn’t happened in our own lives or the lives of the kids we know but the principle is true.
EI is not new of course, many of you will know of it and will appreciate the history of it, perhaps from one of the earliest ‘popular’ authors on the subject, Daniel Goleman.
His description of Emotional Intelligence is where I focus the work I do, and also where the government has settled its SEAL programme.
All of the information I will put out has therefore been mapped against the SEAL programme, so you can rest easy knowing that, if you take on board what I talk about, your football sessions will dovetail with what schools and colleges are doing already, so there will be no confusing messages for kids.
So how did Goleman describe Emotional Intelligence? He broke it down into the following -
The 5 Constructs
Motivation
Managing Feelings
Social Skills
Self-Awareness
Empathy
If you look at those five constructs you need to appreciate this simple truth - You can only teach to your own level of competence.
But anyone can develop their own Emotional Intelligence just as they can develop their knowledge of any subject.
So it is you, the coach that will be the place where my early articles will focus.
I will then look at whether that knowledge is truly used- if it is it means that a person is Emotionally Literate. (As well as that we will look at how we can embed this Emotional Literacy so that even under pressure or strain we remain in control, we have Emotional Resilence.)
All of these terms will be familiar to you when you ‘see’ them in people and indeed feel them in yourself, they are simply descriptors of what goes on in every social interaction.
The start point then for a footballing community that puts kids needs and wants at the centre of all coaching, planning and developments is the coach.
If we, as football coaches can model behaviours and are able to explain to kids, and parents, the reasons why we do things we are already ahead of those who cannot and it is the kids we interact with that will be the biggest winners.