How Emotional Intelligence can help you become a better football coach

As a football coach have you ever caught yourself shouting at a referee or a player for making a mistake?

Have you considered the effects of losing your temper, not only on the individuals concerned but on how people perceive you?

While some respond differently to alternative methods of communication than others, one of the most important qualities of a coach is to not only understand their players, colleagues and the environment, but to also understand themselves, and adapt their approach to suit.

After all, the coaches job is to enhance players’ learning, so being able to deal with their own emotions and the emotions of their players and staff will make for a more suitable environment for growth, development and success.

Being emotionally intelligent is therefore a key component of the well-rounded and effective football coach.

But what is ‘Emotional Intelligence’?

“At a very basic level Emotional Intelligence, or EI, is the ability to identify, assess and manage the emotions of you, of others, and of groups,” says Sarah McQuade, our MiMentor coach development expert who has more than 20 years’ experience within elite sports coach education.

“Imagine the impact on player experiences and outcomes if all coaches were able to perceive, analyse, manage and flex their emotions unbelievably well within practice and competition environments to support athlete learning and development.”

According to a 1988 study from science author Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence refers to the capacity to recognise and manage our own feelings and to recognise and respond effectively to the feelings of others.

EI is defined as the ability to know our own emotional state (self-awareness), sense the emotions in others (social awareness), motivate or know how to motivate our self to create our best performance (self-management or self-regulation) and build productive relationships with others (relationship management).

Self-awareness, understanding how we are feeling, is perhaps the cornerstone of Emotional Intelligence.

An emotionally intelligent coach knows how they feel and why and, importantly, are aware of the potential impact this may have on themselves, the quality of their coaching, their coaching staff and on their players.

When we develop self-awareness, we can begin to choose the types of behaviours that create high-quality coaching experiences and enhance the performances of our players.

Self-awareness is one of the main topics in our new coaching CPD course ‘Coaching Emotional Intelligence’, to be launched on the MiMentor Platform very soon, Sarah McQuade and our Psychology Performance Mentor Philippa McGregor.

The course will teach coaches about enhancing their EI, and specifically their Coaching EI. It looks at coaches’ ability to utilise their skills to improve the quality of the environment, foster productive relationships and encourage the contributions and performances of others.

Coaching Emotional Intelligence explores the concept and competencies of EI, reflects on how effectively you model EI, will help you cultivate strategies for enhancing the critical skills of EI and develop self-awareness in the players you coach.

Improving Emotional Intelligence is like developing any other skill: it takes time and requires hard work, and there are strategies you can use to help, which we cover in our new course.

So if you would like to learn more about Emotional Intelligence and how you can develop you EI to become a more effective football coach, sign-up for FREE to MiMentor Platform and get alerted when the new course goes live.

You will also get access to our free football development content and webinar, and get first news of our new course releases, including Decision Making in Football and The Principles of Play, which will be launched in 2021.

Click the button below to register for MiMentor for free today…