HeadCoach helps athletes arrive ready to perform. It started as the system I built over years of coaching for the skills that decide performance, like self-awareness, confidence and self-control, alongside a player's wellbeing and growth as a person. In 2020 we turned it into technology. Today it's a wellbeing and performance platform for athletes, coaches and clubs, and I lead it as co-founder and President.
Football ability only shows once the interference is out of the way. Some of it sits outside a player's control. A lot of it sits inside, and that part can be trained.
Confidence, focus, resilience, self-control, optimism, competitive drive, teamwork and self-awareness. Each player starts from a baseline across all eight, and on game and training days the app gives them one strategy to use.
Short check-ins on mood, energy and readiness, including a mood meter, help a player put a name to how they feel before they train or play. Naming it is the first step to doing something with it.
Every player needs an aim, the actions that serve it, and the emotional skill to manage the journey. Goal setting starts from what the player values, so the work stays theirs.
A habit that serves a real need outlasts a good week. Self-regulation gets built this way, one small routine at a time.
Both come from outside football. Both changed how I coach inside it.
Players have needs that come before performance. That's the humanistic view of Maslow, as Scott Barry Kaufman has updated it: safety and belonging first, then growth. A coach who only ever looks for what is missing builds the wrong environment, however good the intentions.
Read: Confidence for wellbeing and performanceLisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion holds that the brain builds emotions from the body's state and from past experience. If emotions are built, the way a player reads a pressure moment can be trained, the same way a pass can.
Read: What have habits got to do with emotional intelligence?HeadCoach started as the system I used with my own players, and it still shapes my week on the grass.
I failed a test of my own emotional intelligence in front of my players. What happened, and what I changed.
Self-controlHeadCoach blog, July 2026Two bookings, a red card and a brawl. Why self-control gets zero minutes on the training calendar, and what a trained reset looks like.
PressureHeadCoach blog, July 2026Threat or challenge, and the seconds after a mistake. What Messi did between the miss and the final whistle can be trained.
For anything else, including talks and workshops on the people side of the game, email me directly.
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