S2E32 | Psychology at Spurs: Dan Abrahams on Control, Chaos, and the Crowd

This podcast is part of the Sports Social Podcast Network. Hello and welcome back to the lab. We're joined by sports psychologist Dan Abrams, who spent decades working in elite sport after starting out as a pro golfer and coach. Dan has worked across the Premier League with clubs like Westdam, QPR, Palace and Bournemouth alongside Eddie Howe more recently, with Anna Slott's title winning Fairnaud. He's also been a lead site for England Rugby, England Golf and Aston Martin F1. We talk about the pressure and automatic negative thoughts and the game-face tools players use to stay in a high performance mindset, plus what all this means for Spurs right now. Enjoy the show and as ever, please give us five stars so we can continue to attract the caliber of guests that you're about to hear in this podcast. I'd like to introduce to the podcast, Dan Abrams, for people who have listened to the lab previously you'll know that they've already heard a minute long preamble about what this podcast is about, but I'd just thought given the amount of work you've done in football and in sport around psychology it'd be better for you to introduce yourself because I don't want to butcher it and it's impressive, so if I can just give you the floor for a minute just to introduce yourself to the audience, that'd be incredible. Of course, well I'm honored and delighted to be on your podcast, so thank you so much for the invite. So, yeah, as you say, my name is Dan Abrams, I am a sports psychologist, I've been in high-performance sport for 30 years, originally started as a professional golfer, a hopeless professional golfer didn't win any money whatsoever, largely because of what was going on between my two ears, although mates back home would probably say that a distinct lack of talent didn't help either, and then I moved on to coaching golf and probably everyone will attest to golf being quite psychological sports, so I always had quite an interest in the psychological aspects of golf and in sport in general. And so as I was coaching golf, I decided to head to university and did all my qualifications to become a fully registered and qualified sports psychologist, and I started as a sports psych 20 years ago, and actually funnily enough, so I knew golf like the back of my hand, so I was always going to do a lot of golf as a sports psych, and over the years I've worked across all sports and I will come onto the sports, some of the sports teams I've worked with, but I grew up as a sports supporter, we were talking off air, and I know this is a sports podcast, but I grew up as a sports supporter, so you picked the right sports psych here, and I was very fortunate to, I really wanted to work in football as a sports psych, and so I pitted into non-league football to learn the language of the game and learn the specific challenges of the game that players face. That was 20 years ago, and I had the wonderful pleasure of working alongside one guy called Wayne Burnett, who was the manager of Fisher Athletic in South East London, and I'm saying the wonderful Wayne Burnett because Wayne Burnett has been the under 23's coach at Spurs for the last seven or eight years now, actually, so he has a link to Spurs, but I learnt loads of him, so I had a wonderful introduction, and I started to work with players across the leagues, and then I got introduced to, and I'm going to boo here in terms of West Ham, but I got introduced to West Ham player, Carlton Cole back in 2007, who was languishing in the West Ham Reserve team, and he proved to be my first big case study in the Premier League. I started to work with more West Ham players, Carlton, made his debut for England, and the Fabio Capallo, 18 months into our work together, and so that was a successful case study. I then got to work on a range of clubs over the years, QPR, West Ham, as I said, Crystal Palace, AFC Bournemouth, some clubs I actually can't mention, unfortunately, because I was part of a confidentiality agreement, so a range of Premier League clubs. I worked along with Eddie Hall, AFC Bournemouth for two years, 2022-2024, I worked closely with Anna Slott at Finald, to win the Dutch Airborne Division in the Dutch Cup. In other sports, I've been Leedsike for England Rugby, going into 2019 World Cup, working with Eddie Jones, I was Leedsike for England Golf for a few years, I've been Leedsike for Aston Martin Formula One for a couple of years, I've worked with Olympians and a range of Olympic teams, I've worked cross-bought, I've written four books, three of them football, one of which, so soccer, soccer tough, soccer tough, two soccer brain and golf tough, and soccer tough, very kindly, Gareth Bale, in an interview with the Guardian a few years ago, said that soccer tough changed his life, I don't think it changed his life, but I sold a few books off in the back of that flat, so that was awesome, so I owe him a beer, if I ever get to see him. Well, so that's kind of a potted biography, there's probably more stuff, and I've also got my own podcast, which is half as good as your podcast, it's called The Sports Like Show where we do deep dives into the cycle, I've listened to your podcast, and that's definitely not true, so it's more than half good, it's much better, and it's just fascinating, because I was thinking about how to approach this, because I was really excited about it, and our mutual friend James Alcott helped facilitate it, and I was thinking because our podcast, the Lab and the Fighting Cop, which is assist the podcast with fans, alright, and the way we approach a game and view it is very different from those that play it, in fact, I think the supporters, while we go through our own psychological challenges, can never really understand what it's like for an elite sportsman, because these are men and women that are at the very top of the tree, right? They're the best of class, to be able to play competitively in the Premier League for any club is so difficult for anyone who's kicked the ball, so I was thinking about what things I wanted to ask, and I wasn't sure how to get there, so I'm hopefully this conversation, I'll work my way through it with you, rather than just trying to throw questions at you and trying to sound smart, because I don't think any of us as fans on the sideline can fully appreciate the pressure of playing under a massive contract, of playing in front of 61,000 people, and that level of expectation in that ground, and currently it's like a how to kick the monster, so not only do they have to be excellent at what they do physically, but the mental weight of that, I don't think as fans we fully understand, is that fair? I don't want to be unfair to fact, because look, I mean, we're all human beings and we all have our pressures in life, and a lot of people would immediately explain what these players get, richly rewarded for what they do, certainly at the very highest level of the game, less so down the leagues, but at spurs they certainly will do, so we're all human beings, I think one of the possibly many, but one of the big differences at the elite level of sport, the adult elite, the professional level is everything is under the microscope, and so if you're whatever a profession you do, there is going to be a certain element of pressure there, and certainly pressure in life to pay the bills, and pressure with familial anxieties, but it would be fair to say, I think, for the vast majority of those listening, if they make mistakes at work which we all do, and I do all day, every day I'm sure, if we make mistakes at work, we don't necessarily have 50, 60,000 people responding to that mistake, so it's a particularly unique type of pressure, what is true to build on what you've said is, really, I see football like I see all sports as games of action, football is about actions, let's strip this back and make it really, really simple, football is a game of actions, technical, tactical, physical actions, nobody can deny that, technical actions, tactical actions and physical actions, but those technical, tactical, physical actions are constantly influenced, constantly mediated by the mental side of the game, by what's going on inside of a player, the psychological aspects, they're also heavily influenced by the psycho social aspects, communication, collaboration, cohesion, and so on and so forth, the teamwork, the leadership as well, and so in that respect, football is very demanding, you can strip it back and just say, well, it's a simple game, it's just a bunch of actions, but those actions are constantly influenced by what's going on inside of a player and what's going on around a player, and so those demands are on a player, now you've talked about pressure, when you come to gameplay, so when we think of psychology, we can probably think of three things, again, to strip things back, we can probably think about engagement, how do we engage a player, we can think about learning, how do we help a player learn, and we can think about performance, how do we help a player perform, now we're honing in on performance here, you're talking about the performance when it comes to pressure on game day, the thing about game day, players experience pressure because of high importance and high uncertainty, when performance is high, excuse me, when when her importance is high, and when uncertainty is high, they tend to therefore have a lot of what I call ants, ants is an acronym for automatic negative thoughts, the A for automatic, the N for negative, the T for thoughts, okay, now let me build on that briefly, there are 8 billion human beings on planet earth, and I think we can safely say right now there's a lot of geopolitical divide between us 8 billion people, especially right now, but there you could argue there's one thing that 8 billion people have in common, and that's that inside of us, when we strip psychology back, we all have thoughts and emotions feelings, just three things, okay, thoughts we think emotions, we emote feelings, we feel, thoughts and emotions feelings, so I want to invite all the listeners to consider themselves watching spurs, watching their favourite team, and they're watching the actions that are going on, going on, technical, tactical, physical actions, underneath the surface those players are having thoughts and emotions feelings, thoughts and emotions feelings, thoughts and emotions feelings, they've got a focus of attention, it's guiding things, but they've got thoughts and emotions feelings that are hitting, they're conscious awareness at any given time, now let's come back to this idea on game day, because there's high importance and because there's high uncertainty, if there's a great chance that players are going to have an overwhelm or an enormous amount of, ants, automatic negative thoughts emotions feelings, I'm bolting on the emotions and feelings, so on game day, when you go out there, you go to white highlight, you're watching on spurs on TV, or you're watching any team on TV, maybe you're watching your favourite national team on TV, and you've probably got some ants yourself, some automatic negative thoughts emotions feelings, would those players definitely have ants, automatic negative thoughts emotions feelings, and so what is absolutely critical is players have to be able to optimise their capacity to execute their technical tactical, physical actions irrespective of the ants that they're experiencing, they have to be able to squash their ants, they have to be able to turn down the volume of ants and execute the technical tactical, physical actions that they're training throughout the week on game day, that is absolutely crucial, that is what it is to be able to play under pressure, sometimes players do that really well, sometimes less well, sometimes, you know, some players are just, they have so much skill in their feet, the by and large they do it well all the time, most or most of the time, and just some players have a lot of skill in their feet, but you know, they tend to fold, they tend to get engulfed with the ants, they tend to have ant farms, and so when a team is under performing, when things aren't going so well, what you can pretty much guarantee is there's a great deal, there are very many ants going on within the individuals and across, you know, the individuals within an organisation, and that influences the culture, it includes influences the environment, the feel around the place, the culture, what we say and what we do, and it just infiltrates, I mean, I've been in their clubs teams across all sports, but especially in football, where the whole organisation starts to feel helpless, as a consequence of that, the environment really starts to feel down, and the spondent, and flapping anxious, so that gives you, you know, there's so many directions we can take, that gives you a slight indication of, you know, what players might experience, but they've got to overcome that, and you know, they've got to be able to compete in what I call their high performance mindset, this is something we did at final, very well with Anna Slott, is we worked on players being able to find their high performance mindset, to start there and stay there, no matter what, and often we did that very well, we beat Iax away from home for the first time in 17 years, in the stadium with no final fans in there, and another occasion we did it less well, we played Roma, Jose Maria, in the quarter finals of the Europa League, and we were 10 minutes away from winning, we were trying to hold on to things, and there was definitely players dropped down to their low performance mindset, because of the amps, the automatic negative thoughts emotions feelings, and so subsequently our performance was impacted. So it's a constant test to be able to get that right. That's fascinating. So what you're saying, no, what I'm saying, based on what you've just said, is that there's an aunt hill in the back of the month, which may not be fair. So how then, if you've identified the fact that every human being has aunt's respective of their challenges in their own life, and I feel like I have aunts, I had aunts before start this podcast, I do before every podcast, I feel nervous, right? I don't know what it's going to be, I don't know how you're going to be, but I know that I've done this before and I've been through this process many, many times, and so I know that I can do it, so I'll go ahead. But there is always, now that I'm talking to you, there is always this moment just before, where I think, I hope they don't show up. Yes, because if they don't show up, I don't have to do anything, and I don't have to perform, I don't have to produce a podcast that I hope the people like. Well, how do you, how do you say so, so imagine you're working with a spurs player at the moment, which is, there's a lot going on, and there's absolutely, it's absolutely reasonable at Tottenham Arts, but right now for players to perhaps succumb to aunts in a way that they might not have done at their previous clubs where things were going really well. What, can you describe in short form how you might approach a dealing with aunts or what happened? Yeah, yeah, there was no problem. So, you know, let's go with that high performance mindset, low performance mindset. So players have aunts on a manate negative thoughts, emotions, feelings, it brings them down to the low performance mindset. That means that we have to create mental frameworks for players, mental frameworks that enables them to start and stay in that high performance mindset. They need to know, they need to know what that looks like, they need to have specific tangible practical, simple to apply tools and techniques in order to be able to compete in that high performance mindset, no matter what, to do that a white, hard lane, to do that away from home. So, you know, what does that look like? Well, again, there's different directions that we can take here, but let me, let me draw on a specific mental technique that I will tend to help players have. And so, if I draw my experiences, if I, again, if I go back to Firenaud with Anaslott, I would suggest all 25 players had and utilise the mental technique I'm about to talk about. You mentioned the men's and women's side of the game. I've just been in Los Angeles working with Angel City, which is the world's biggest women sporting franchise. And I was there for three days and we were using this technique. So, this is a regular technique and it's a technique I call a game face. And how a game face works is I will get a player to draw on their memory, okay? To try to remember themselves at their best, okay? And so, I'll get them I'll sit with them and I'll say, hey, tell me about you at your best. What did that look like? What did that feel like? What did others see when you were at your best? There's a camera on you, which it would be for spurs, plays for example. What did that, what did that camera see when you were at your best? And so, I'll get them to think about it. I'll get them to picture it, mental rehearsal or visualisation or imagery are the terms that we might use in sports psychology. So, I'll get them to picture that. And then what I do is I get them to break that down into some action-based words, some action-based words, alert, alive, lively, relentless, cool, calm, focused, relaxed, upbeat, dominant, relentless. There are a whole series of action-based words. I've got a little slide that I will put in front of a player that I, for example, if you could picture now me in front of all the final squad, a few of whom now play in a Premier League, a couple of them who now play in Spain, sent you gymnasies who play for AC Milan, David Hanchko, who's at Athletica Madrid. So, they all went off to different clubs after a couple of seasons we had with them. But, so, there was a whole bunch of action-based words, so I've got them to pick a couple of action-based words, so one of them might pick dominant and upbeat, another one might pick positive and relaxed, another one might have picked focused and, focused and athletic. The wonderful thing about action-based words is that they are great descriptors of actions. I know that sounds obvious, but they are great descriptors of actions. And so, if I've got somebody who says dominant and relentless, which I did, who's one of the world's greatest fallbacks, or has been historically over the last five years, he picked dominant and relentless when I did this with him. I would speak to him for about 15 minutes about what dominant and relentless looked like for him. So, he would talk about being dominant in one V1, dominant in Jules, relentlessly getting up and down the pitch, dominant in the air. He would break that down as to what he would be doing to do that. He would be talking about being dominant in the back line, holding that back line in the dominant fashion. He would talk about being relentless with his positive gestures and relentless with his vocals. This is the beauty of action-based words, is they are great descriptors of actions, and you can create a really powerful narrative or story in your mind that enables you to weave, as I say, a great story or narrative going into again. So, dominant and relentless. Now, some players have that for their gameface, so this player had dominant and relentless, and that was their gameface. I want those players to put that first going into the game. My job on the pitch is to be dominant and relentless. I'm going to be dominant and relentless nonstop. Nothing in no one takes me away from dominant and relentless. If you run, if you move, if every action, if my cross goes into rosette, if I miss the chance to score, if we go and go down, dominant and relentless, dominant and relentless, dominant and relentless, I'm in control. I'm in charge. I want them to weave a story or narrative of control, as in self-control, because that's what high performance sport is all about. It's all about self-control. If we want to control the game using our game model, which the manager wants their team to do, we need players who can engage in self-control. So, this gameface helps. Now, the interesting aspect of the gameface is it can go beyond action-based words and move into metaphors and model players. So, often I'll work with a player and I'll say, is there a player who, once we've got the action-based words in place, I will ask a player, is there a player that is a model player for you? Somebody who you want to play, like somebody that, you know, kind of executes actions in the style that you want to play. Like, I will give you a working example here. Somebody I can talk about. Sandy Jimenez, now AC Malat, right? The Mexican striker. He picked Benzema. So, he had something like a gameface of dominant powerful Benzema, dominant powerful Benzema. Benzema, because the wonderful thing about model players, and this is a classic psychology because it's social learning theory, which was studied by a psychologist called Albert Bandura for about 50 years of his professional career as a psychologist. Social learning theory proposes that most of our learning is done in a social manner. We look and we do. We look and we do. We can copy people. So, when Sandy Jimenez thinks about, or at least when I was working with him, used to think about dominant powerful Benzema, he would think about all the things that he would do in a dominant powerful way, every action, technical, technical, physical action, and he would think about the actions that Benzema, the run, the movements, the little tricks, the little deceptive motions that helps him find space in the penalty area, dominant powerful Benzema. So, again, what's he doing? He's weaving a story like that. He's number one job on the pitch is to be dominant powerful Benzema. I might have ants, automatic negative thoughts and motion feelings, but I'm going to squash those ants by coming back to dominant powerful Benzema. A final way to use the game face is you can have two action based words. You can have a couple of action based words in a model player, or you can have a couple of action based words. And this always gets a bit of a chuckle, but this is an interesting thing about psychology. I invite a player to think about an animal, a lion, a leopard, a cheater, something like that. Now, as I said, this always gets a little bit of a chuckle, but I worked with a player who would be considered at least a top ten maybe for a time a top five and has been in the England squads, so a top five or top ten striker in England. And he had a game face of confident, relentless lion, confident, relentless lion. And he openly laughed at me when I asked him about the game and what about the animal, but then he got a little bit more serious and he thought about it. He said, "Dan, I'm a predator in that game. I'm the king of that penalty area, the king of the jungle. I'm a lion. I've got to stay a lion nonstop. I tend to have ants, automatic, negative thoughts, emotions, feelings. If I've missed a few chances to score, if we've got to the 75th minute, I think the gaffer's going to haul me off. So that's when I need to continue to be a lion." Now the science he was done in the 1970s, with a wait for this, a cognitive linguistic called Professor George Latoff from Berkeley College in North California. And he did this in the 1970s around metaphors. It's something like 70% of language is metaphorical. And this is why we can take things like confident, relentless lion, confident, relentless cheetah, and think about animals as super fast, super strong, super lean, super powerful. And so that works fast. This is a metaphor. And so what are game faces is a very fast acting tool for players to be able to talk to themselves about, especially in the moment, and then to be able to be do act in body and enact in the moment, that embodiment. This is taken from a branch of psychology called embodied cognition. Cognition being our mental processes, our mental processes are embodied. So they're of the body. People who think psychology is from the neck upwards, don't understand psychology. Psychology is from your head down to your feet, your feet to your head up to your head. Your body is one of the greatest psychological weapons or tools that you have. So I want that fall back to embodied dominant relentless. I want sandy to embody dominant powerful Benzema. I want that striker to be confident, relentless lion, non-stop. Be it, do it, act it. So your self talk, talking to yourself helps and your body, your body language helps here. Final things to say is I have a wonderful clip taken from the BBC about a decade ago. Just after Roy Keane had written his autobiographies, it's an interview with him, opposed to some social media sometimes, where he's talking about being a great actor. He's saying, look, you know, I'm not like this at home. Of course, I'm not like this at home, but I'm an actor on the pitch. And in many respects, performance is an act. You've got to be do an act who you need to be when you cross that right line. And that is what again, face is. So that is one of many tools that I might use with the play to help them to engage in control to take control and take charge. That is what I'm not here to talk about spurs players specifically or club that spurs the club. But what I would be saying is you want players to be able to engage in control to take charge, take control. If we go a go down, getting your game face, squash your ants, take control. If we go a go up, get it getting your game face, squash your ants, take control, stay there no matter what. Otherwise, you won't optimize your capacity to execute your technical, tactical, physical actions to the best of your ability. That is fascinating. And you can imagine because just by watching it on the sofa or in the ground, when you go a goal behind the things aren't going well, you can hear it in the crowd. And you can feel it as a supporter that we're not going to get back into this like the ants settle everywhere, not just in the player in the minds of the players or the bodies of the players, but also inside the fanbase. And naturally, one of the things that's not tangible but is real is the emotion that you hear within the stands and players not only have to deal with their own, you know, to deal with situations they can't control. What did you describe it was? There was two things that you, it's a high pressure environment, but it's also one that's high risk or the one that you can't control. So there's risk of failure as well as a high pressure environment something along those lines said, really. So, so, so important, important to an uncertainty. There's high importance and it's high uncertainty. It's highly important, it's high uncertainty. And just to, just to come back at you, just really to interject slightly is those ants can be, it can be seen from the stats because what you, sometimes it's very subtle and it's difficult to see, but the way it plays out is it impacts awareness, anticipation and decision-making. So it lessens player awareness. So they're not picking up the cues that are emerging and dissolving around them. They don't pick up the cues that can be slightly slower to anticipate. So they're going to be slightly slower in the drill. They're going to be slightly slower to get into space, to cover space. They're going to be slightly slower to see the runs of their teammates and the runs of the opposition, for example. And then the decision-making, which essentially decision-making is action and action is decision-making or decision-making becomes poorer. So you're action to become poorer. Your technical coordination and your tactical awareness becomes poorer. So that's how it plays out and it is just all over the pitch where you've got a couple of players in golfing ants that can kill the whole team, kill the whole team. So when you look at someone like Harry Kane, you think him as like to use a sort of horribly shaved, like a mentality monster. He's never, it doesn't seem like he's ever succumbed to ants or any self-doubt. If he misses a chance, he'll get another one and he just continues. Even when Spurs were poor, and I'd say who means on, they're probably similar in that respect as well. Would you consider them mentally, I know physically, we know what they are as footballers, but mentally, would you consider them without examining them or talking to them as top of their field in being able to control their emotion? I'll answer that in several. It's a great question. Number one, rule number one in sports psychology and in psychology in general, in consultancy practice, it's never assume some of these mindset. Look at that, but that said, I think we can safely say they are sophisticated and accomplished from a mental perspective. The interesting dynamic is you could probably guarantee if I said stepped into Spurs at that time when they were there. And Harry Kane would probably seek me out to have conversations. That's the paradox here is that often the players who need it the least seek you out and probably often the players who need it the most don't and there's all kind of social dynamics there. The other thing to say, as I said, I grew up as a Spurs supporter and I'm a big Harry front-cane fan. What a player he is and what a job he's done at Bayern Munich. Let's be hypercritical here. There is one moment over at moment. You could probably suggest that he got involved in that. Exactly. Exactly. The penalty kick, which is very interesting because England did so much work on this. In fact, I know the person who initiated this with Gareth South getting changed the narrative around penalties in England from this is just luck to know this is skill and we're going to work on that skill and we're going to work on these routines. So it was very interesting that he missed that. Now, look, it ultimately with these things and I'm trying to not be unfair on Harry and not make too many assumptions but he might say, "No, you know what? Dan, I did everything right there and I was happy with the executioner just slightly missed timed it and it wasn't mine." And that's fine. That's for him to say, not for me to say. But I'm not so sure. I think he's that skill for that. It might be that he just didn't quite align his attention and intent with where he should have been. So interesting. So when you say that, is that how does he align correctly? So I know he had a regime which before I've seen him score 30, 40 penalties for Tottenham. He would do a particular type of run. He would breathe, he'd be breathing exercises and then he'd get to a point where inevitably 95, 96% of the time he would bury the penalty. And we don't know. We will never know whether or not it was a mental issue in that moment but you can understand the ants getting involved there because this is England against France. This could be huge against the best team in the competition then. It's understandable on a psychological level that he might deny it but there was a probability that psychologically he didn't deliver or didn't put the processes in place in order to give him the best chances. Well, Dave, you're talking to someone who, as a professional golfer, would stand on the first, he would nobody watching in a local event being golfed in ants. So I'm certainly not going to talk. I completely agree. And wasn't it zinnied into that? No, no, no, it wasn't zinnied into that in that penalty against England in the last minute years ago who threw up, you know, ants are going to exist. And let me be clear, because you mentioned earlier, you have ants before you come on to this podcast. All the time, you know, some ants, you know, nobody's denying that's the existence of some ants, you know, gets your mind and body ready. It helps you be alert and ready alert, ready, you know, it pinpoints your focus of attention. It readyes your body for a high intent battle, you know, so some ants is when ants engulf you. And I could completely understand why Harry would be engulfed in ants in it. And again, respecting that he might say, no, no, no, no, no, I did my routine. I got it spot on. You mentioned raisin. We talk about routine. And the interesting thing for me is, again, having been a pro golfer, you would argue that we are every single shot is like a penalty kick in as much as they are dead ball situations. And so so much of my work within golf, when I was a lead site for England golf, when I've been out on the PGA tours, the DP world tour, I work with golfers to create routines that help optimize their capacity to pay attention at an optimal intensity with a very strong intent for each and every shot. That's what you're trying to do with a routine, whether that's a goal shot or a penalty kick, you know, so you've mentioned some things to your spot on, you know, Harry's going to be adjusting his body language, you know, he's going to have a particular way that he walks himself back. He is going to breathe. He is going to be somebody who either, he has a within his routine, he's going to be somebody who chooses where he's going to place it, or he's going to leave that to the last minute or something depending on, you know, where he's seen the goalkeeper go. What we know within routines is you want to keep it as consistent as possible. The one thing I'd say about it all is, again, I come back to your body is one of the most powerful weapons. So breathing and the adjustment of your body language into a specific penalty kick game face, if you like, is absolutely critical. Be in control and in charge of yourself in order to turn down the volume of answers much as you can and execute that with as high an intent as you can. If you miss, you miss, but take control and take charge no matter what. Yeah. And I'm thinking as a civilian, somebody can't play at that level. You can't, I wouldn't, I don't think it would be possible regardless of the training and you definitely disagree with me here, but regardless of the training psychologically, there's no way that you can't know or accept or understand that there are hundreds of millions of people watching this. And not only that, the weight of, you know, an entire nation on your back, because if we'd have scored that, we'd probably would have probably would have gone through. So no matter how good the player is and how psychologically robust he is and how trained he is, is actually an example of human beings in the purest form when you fail in that moment. Yeah. And, you know, it draws me back to, you know, things I talk with players about in terms of ants and thoughts, emotions, feelings is that, you know, we talk about football, a lot of people say to me, you can, you know, I can understand why, you know, you're a psychologist for golfers because, you know, there's lots of time to think and, you know, it's a static ball and blah, blah, blah, but, you know, football really has that psychological sport. And, and, you know, because it's so quick and there's no time in it. That's a complete misunderstanding of how the brain is structured and how it functions. The brain, football works in seconds. You know, it's that classic, you know, before, it takes a second to score a goal. It takes a second to complete a pass. It takes a second to give the ball away. But, the brain works in milliseconds. So the brain trumps football for speed every single time. So again, when you're watching, I urge people listening in, watch the game with thoughts, emotions, feelings in mind. Watch the game with ants in mind because underneath the surface, you're looking at the actions. Think about the internal, I write about this in my introduction in talk at all. Think about the internal driving the external thoughts, emotions, feelings that are merging into the conscious awareness of the player that's happening in milliseconds, milliseconds, especially feelings. I feel anxious. I feel frustrated. I feel angry. I feel despondent. You know, these are happening in milliseconds. And there's a fair argument to be made that the human brain and nervous system is designed to judge what's going on around it. We're designed to judge how the opposition doing, how my team makes doing. What's the situation here? Am I doing well with relation to my goals? Am I doing well with relation to the manager's goals? Is this good? You know, and suddenly we have this surge of thoughts, emotions, feelings around this judgment that you start to release the kind of hormones related to a cortisol, your stress hormone, for instance, that can really suppress your capacity to play. And this is where players can easily get lost. And that's where if you're watching a game and a player is playing poorly, it's like this player is engulfed in ants and is unable to snap out of that. That the brain working milliseconds actually has a specific name. It's called ambient neural activity, an ambient neural activity. In one of my books, I talked about Anna and the ants as a play on Adam and the ants, the eighties of programs and so on. Yeah, yeah. So it's hard. And that's dealing with the internal. You know, you've got to remember, you've got to deal with the internal as the game's going on around you and dealing with the external. You've got players who, you know, spurs go to an inform your night, they go to Arsenal, they go to Liverpool and it's like, you've got your playing good players. You're playing players who want to win. You're playing against good teams. And it is hard and it is tough. So this is where things can go horribly, horribly wrong when it does. And it's taken back to the training ground. As I said to you earlier, man, it's like the environment can fall quickly. If managers and coaches aren't and the broader staff aren't taking care of their culture and environment, then things can drastically fall off a cliff. And that's where that's where coaches and managers lose their jobs. Yeah, yeah. And when you listen to this, you just think of how nuanced the all is. And how binary fans view football, which is, you know, with sporting directories defined by how many players he brings through the door. There is a shower of complexity that really defines whether or not a player is a success or the environment is this one that's conducive to to being a success. And I guess listening to you here, then is as a psychologist, a sports psychologist, you're building a construct around a player in on a subconscious level through practical means so that they can cope in high pressured environments without thinking about it, or at least giving them the best opportunity to be able to react and perform in a certain way. Is that how much of this is subconscious for these people or is it? Is it not? Yeah, look, I think that's a really good question, and I can't put a figure on it, but I would actually come from the perspective of what you're trying to do. If you work with an individual player, you're trying to consciously help them create a mental framework relevant for their game that helps them compete in a high performance mindset that optimises their performance. And a great deal of that, at least at the beginning, is heavily conscious. And that's where I want them to use every activity and every session. It doesn't matter if it's a Rondo keyboard or small-sided game and 11 for 11, it doesn't matter. I want them to practice that mental framework in training. How much of that then becomes a part of them, you know, intuitive. Some of it, absolutely. But I still want them, you know, of a normal week where there's a game at the weekend. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I want them to practice continuing to consciously practice in training and consciously creating great images in their mind, day to day, of them executing every action in their high performance mindset, their HPM. Now, when I'm given the ideal situation, when I'm in the club, that's where I'll throw you some psych drug and hear shared mental model. And again, I'm going to come back to my work with Anastatic Final. That's what we did pretty well there, because we had a lot of buy-in across the club from the medical sports, science, staff, a couple of heads of performances who are awesome. They really drove this term high performance mindset and this other term low performance mindset. They really drove this every day in the gym, in the physio, in the medical department, on the training ground. In the games, I know that when we played, again, in April 2023, coming to us the close at the season, we were about 5 points ahead, we played Ajax. In their stadium, as I said earlier, we hadn't beaten them away from home for 17 years. If they beat us, they're breathing down our neck, they've got momentum. We've gone two, one down at half time. I know, for a fact, that on, I wasn't there, but on was in their emphasizing high performance mindset. So by that on me, if you can get the coaches and you can get the manager, and you've got the performance staff and the broader staff who are speaking the same language. And ideally, you've got the leaders or the senior players who are driving the same language. Now we have a shared mental mod. Now we have a better chance of players starting staying in their high performance mindset, their HPM. Each player will have their own unique HPM, what that means to them. But we've got this term and it's a shared mental model. That is powerful because then we're leading on that leadership. Then we're teaming around that teamwork. Then we have an organisation whose culture and environment is affixed to and passionate about mindset. That rarely exists in my humble opinion. And that's my big bug by after doing this for 20 years. And that's why when I walk into an organisation, and at the moment, I can only tell you, I've got a few things going down, but as I said a couple of weeks ago, Angel City in America and the women are great for this. I've got to tell you, they are. Absolutely. And don't get me. I pride myself on some of the use able to bring this alive and stand on front. I'm happy to stand in front of there's a lot of things that terrify me in life. I'll stand in front of Manchester City and deliver this. I don't care because I'm fairly well versed and experienced and can do this. And I know I can capture players, but you're always driving against a degree of skepticism with the men, less so the women. And isn't to suggest there's no skepticism with the women. And it isn't to suggest that it's all badness with the men. But you're driving, driving, driving, trying to drive it. Now the women at Angel City were great. They might go and have a horrendous season. I'm not suggesting they're going to have a great season, but we're able to drive a shared mental model through that culture. They've put HPM up on the walls. They put it in the locker room. I mean, again, please excuse me being a bit named robbery here, but when I was at final, the under 19's coach was Robin van Persie. A bit of an arch enemy here, because I know he played for Arsenal, but he was great. He was into gamefaces. Every one of his under 19 players. I mean, now he's the head coach of final. Every one of his under 19's had a gamefaces because he wanted that for them, because he knows how important that is. And he said some fascinating stuff to me about, you know, what he would do, learning of Burkamp, linking up with Fabric Gas. But you, I've kind of lost my train of thought, but coming back to what I think the main point was is that you're trying to get that shared mental model. And when I look at the examples through the Premier League right now, I am skeptical that the shared mental model is there for most. It's not the only way to do this. And you can look at team clubs like, I suppose the obvious two would be Brentford and Brighton Punching above their weight. And the kind of things they do organizationally behind the scenes would be somewhat stellar. I don't know if they do shared mental models. I think they do in different ways. But that to me is what you're looking to do. That is tough to do when you have 25 superstars in the room. And this word shared, you've got different lenses of the world and sharing things is tough. And that's why, you know, I walk into an organization and I say, this is Gold Standard. If we can get here, and I think we did this pretty good, we didn't do it perfect, we did it pretty good at the final, which complimented Anna's great coaching at that time. He is a great coach. If that is the Gold Standard, that is the Gold Standard. But it's when you get siloed as a sports psychologist and you say sitting in your office down the hall, that is BS. And you have to get teams and coaches and managers that the ultimate is when you get them to give you permission to do stuff on the grass, not to take activities but to take a team huddle. Because you have to integrate mindset into these things, you have to integrate mindset because every technical, technical, physical actions constantly influenced. So the place to do mindset leadership and teamwork is on the grass in activities in between activities. It has to be coach led, player driven and system supported. And that is the highest level of the sport, the highest level of football in England, but across Europe and probably across the world. That is really hard to do. And I don't know if there's a Gold Standard of that out there. Dan, I've got through maybe five percent of what I want you to ask. Sorry, I'm off the line. No, no, no, it's not that it was just fascinating. I just didn't want to interrupt the flow of the conversation. It's good for time. No, no, I need to, I'd love to speak to you again and have and sort of pencil in some really specific stuff. I think it's interesting, but this has been too interesting to pigeonhole that into you. But what you was talking about there, I was thinking about Real Madrid for some reason. When you were talking about having that sort of combined a degree, ethos and approach to football because Javier Lonzo has just been voice even resigned or removed from his post. And, and, and you think of Louis and Rico when he had, you know, perhaps some Bappé weren't what wasn't given him what he wanted to, that he had to remove him from the situation to improve everything. And a coach that doesn't appreciate the kind of mental aspects of the game might be, might have an issue. And then when you find that club, I think Liverpool and Klopp and Fair Nord and on a slot were really good examples where everything was aligned and probably your Manchester City as well as, you know, regardless of what you think about that football club and how it's come to its recent success, you can't deny that they are brilliant at everything they do pretty much. But I just, I guess my final question and I hope we get to speak again done and I hope you have time for me because there's so much more I want to ask you. But in the interest of ending this, the civilised time, would you argue that at a football club if it is to be successful or at least give it's best chance of being successful, that perhaps this environment that you've talked about in terms of being successful, if it does it need to come from the board going down or can it exist in a changing room alone and be successful, does it have to be symptomatic across the club, a systematic rub? Yeah, look, that's a really good question. I think that, I don't think there's one way to do this. And, you know, I think it, as a sports psychologist, I've been brought into the clubs and teams in so many different ways by so many different people, whether it's, you know, the head of the medical and sports science or whether it's the head coach themselves, I had that recently, my head coach, I mean, manager as well. And then I've been brought in by the owner, and that can cause all kinds of problems, you know, in terms of trust and things like that. Have you trust that when you've been brought into the club? Oh, yeah, geez. And you're like, I don't, I'm not, I'm not wanted by the, yeah, people don't, people don't want it. Every, every year brought in, there's going to be a challenge because people become suspicious in these environments. So creating trust, you could almost argue, you're never going to get 100% trust. So you've got to put the right processes and practices in place that gives us the best chance irrespective of not building complete trust across the whole organization. You know, these organizations filled with people and people are complex, you know, and people gossip and whisper and talk. And that's an evolutionary thing, you know, to gossip because we're constantly trying to get along and get ahead and survive in our given environment. So these are complex environments with complex people. So, you know, it doesn't need to be brought in by the boardroom. Well, that can cause problems. There's no ideal way. I think ultimately what you want is you need to be a skillful when you're in there and try to find the right allies and try to use those allies to create that shared mental model, but top down, bottom up, so vertically and horizontally. So things are as system-led as possible. So each department from top down from boardroom, down through departments, coaching staff to players are involved. You want to make it as coach-led as possible. So coaches are leading this and they are using the language irrespective of who's brought you in. And then you, and an example of that would be I was brought in at final by head of sports science medical or head of performance and I had to build a relationship with Anna slide and that take took time. And then you want it as player driven as possible because ultimately they are not psychologists per se, but they are the most powerful psychologists in the room. You know you've got it when it is player driven and you hear that load in American sport, NFL, NBA. They are constantly trying to get something as player driven as possible. So system supported, system supported, coach-led, player driven, that's your ideal combos irrespective who has brought you in. If you can only hit one of those. If you've only got one on our, or two allies, it's something, then you're asking how much impact can I make and that is probably the less you've got, the less influence you've got, the less impactful you're going to be. If you want to hear more from Dan Abrams and I do, then you can go and listen to his podcast the sports like show. Dan, I've still got so much to ask you. And like I say, I hope we can rearrange this again and not rearrange it, rearrange, arrange another show so that we, I can ask you all the other stuff I want to ask you. That's been amazing. Thank you so much, Dan. What do you want to say? One of these things is a ravi-tola. Thank you. Pantsville and Fransizing, the most famous, the most famous ravi-tola in the world. Come on, ravi-tola, it's your favorite ravi-tola. Pantsville, Pistefi.