“Body language is everything in life… If you don’t have a positive mind and can’t accept that you can make mistakes, and how to respond to them, and how to help when your partner makes a mistake, then this kind of thing goes way beyond then the tactics. That’s all in life.”
Pep Guardiola’s recent insistence on Erling Haaland reveals the sophistication of his leadership skills and understanding of human nature. This is culture building, continually investing in the long term even as we try to win the game in the short term. In this he still differs from most other leaders in the sport and beyond. How what others see as “the little things” are actually “the big things.” The Manchester City manager expertly works with our most crucial human performance tools in our personal and professional lives: mindset and behavior.
Related: Gaël Clichy: ‘Pep Guardiola is all about the details. It was amazing to witness.”
Here one of sport’s greatest life lessons jumps out at us, but it’s a lesson that remains largely unheeded. In both childhood and adult life, we rarely schedule time to develop our mindset and behavior. But for Guardiola, they come first and not last in his priorities. We often don’t even notice how we think and behave, but the Guardiola lens constantly zooms in on that. We often feel uncomfortable discussing the way we think and behave, but for Guardiola it is normal to talk about it. Why? Because it would be madness and very detrimental to performance not to do so. Moreover, this goes beyond performance; it’s how we are as people and it’s the key to success on and off the field.
Guardiola does not want Haaland to show his frustration on the pitch through his facial expressions and movements. “He has to have a positive mood and say: ‘Okay, it will come, it will come.’” At first there seems to be a paradox between the animated Guardiola we see leading his team from the sidelines and this philosophy . of the faith “it will come, it will come”. But it would be a mistake to interpret these words as soft or passive; they recognize how our minds can work best, and are thus smart and performance-oriented. Guardiola highlights an opportunity to notice and understand our human brains and bodies, in order to improve our mindset and behavior in the next moment.
When players beat themselves up after conceding a goal, they directly damage their prospects of playing well when the game starts again. That’s what Guardiola can see when Haaland gets frustrated. He challenges a deep-rooted macho narrative that justifies self-criticism as part of being tough and setting high standards. But as several branches of neuroscience are now showing us, it’s much more helpful for performance to accept the mistake, acknowledge your shortcomings, and focus on what you can do next.
Whenever I have observed or worked in football environments, I have been struck by the overwhelming focus on technique and tactics. Match debriefings (over)analyzed technique and tactics, but rarely considered what was going on in the players’ minds when showing an action film. The game plans focused on technique and tactics, but left out discussions about who the players wanted to be on the pitch, how they wanted to interact with each other and how they wanted to respond to the inevitable highs and lows of the upcoming match.
TV football analysis focuses on goal moments, which are considered crucial because they are so closely linked to the result. But that’s a pitfall. Guardiola looks elsewhere for crucial moments: the mood of players on the bench or how players react after they concede a goal, how they hold up on the field or on the bench, how they support each other. These are key moments where players influence the match in ways they can control, even if it’s not what the cameras notice.
Football’s appeal is enhanced by the uncertainty of the outcome: a goal can be scored against the run of play, or a brilliant team can repeatedly hit the crossbar and fail to score. We all know this, and it reflects a lot of wider life off the pitch too. Still, it can be difficult to take our minds off the focus on goals scored or conceded. Guardiola is not drawn into that way of thinking and is prioritizing helping his players avoid it as well.
There is a constantly growing body of research into how the brain and body are connected. Philosophers first investigated this centuries ago. Thanks to advances in modern neuroscience, we now understand much more about how the way we move affects the way we think and feel. The somatic theory dispels the false belief that our brains somehow think separately from our bodies, and explains how changing our posture and posture can change how we feel and subsequently behave.
Related: ‘I’m sorry’: Pep Guardiola apologizes to Kalvin Phillips for commenting on his weight
Novak Djokovic explains that his mental strength is not innate, but something he is constantly working on. How his mental strength is not about never being distracted, but about noticing the distractions when they occur, accepting them as fully human, and then quickly returning his attention to the next moment in the game.
Too often I hear coaches urging players to stay focused, making them feel bad for losing focus, instead of accepting that this is how our brains work, and helping them shift their attention quickly.
It’s where sports provide us with a way to learn how to change the course of the game before us, whether our work is on a football field or in the office. But I don’t know why it’s not already part of the way we learn about sports at school, or in most coaching courses. Developing a mindfulness practice that helps us notice our thoughts and feelings and how they relate to our behavior is rare in athletes’ training programs. But this is clearly an area that offers greater performance gains. And I’m hopeful that in a future version of Fantasy Football, points will be awarded for how the players on your team reacted on the pitch when they made a mistake or conceded a goal.