Professor Adam Nicholls: The Building Blocks of Mental Toughness

Welcome to the Great Coaches: Leadership & Life newsletter.

Every month, we share new podcast episodes featuring interviews with Great Coaches from across the world of sports. Our interviews delve deep into the careers and leadership of our guests, seeking new insights to help us all lead our teams, communities and families better.

We also frequently share additional content and insight from our interviews across our social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Youtube, and TikTok. You can learn more about The Great Coaches, follow our channels and explore our website from our new Linktree page.

On Sports Psychology With Professor Adam Nicholls

For this week’s interview, I was joined by Professor Adam R. Nicholls from the UK’s University of Hull. Professor Adam has carried out some fantastic research in the areas of stress, appraisal and coping amongst athletes, and has met a number of elite-level athletes along the way. 

Much of our interview focuses on Adam’s terrific book, “Psychology in Sports Coaching: Theory and Practice”, which serves as a brilliant guide for anyone looking to incorporate psychology into their coaching approach and practice. 

Adam shared his description of the difference between mastery and performance climates, and how they each impact the motivation and culture within a team. He also made a great case for reframing the search for perfection to a search for excellence, placing a focus on what you have to do in order to be excellent. 

Another great topic that came up was that of negative self-talk. Adam has identified a link between negative self-talk and its detrimental impact on performance and confidence, and shares insight into how coaches can intervene to help athletes transform their self-talk. 

This was a really brilliant conversation, and a chance to delve into the mind of someone who has spent a considerable amount of time and energy really researching the psychology of elite sports and coaching. I’m sure you’ll really enjoy listening to it. 

Listen Now: Apple | Spotify

This Week’s Guest

Professor Adam R. Nicholls is based in the Department of Sport, Health, and Exercise Science at the University of Hull in the UK. His research is primarily related to studies of stress, appraisal and coping amongst athletes. 

Adam has published three books and more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles, with his research bringing him into contact with elite-level Rugby Union and Rugby League players, as well as major-winning golfers. From these experiences, he says that he has “learned a great deal about what it takes to perform under pressure”. 

Adam also posts some terrific content on Linked In, which is where Great Coach John Buchanan first brought him to my attention.

On Science-Backed Approaches

In each issue of the Great Coaches newsletter we share a different short lesson on leadership, inspired by the insights and ideas shared by our podcast guests.

In this week’s interview, I spoke with Professor Adam R. Nicholls about the ways in which psychology can be utilised within leadership and coaching practices. It was a great opportunity to reflect on some of the extensive and brilliant research and studies out there helping us to better lead and understand our team members, each other, and ourselves.

Over the years of us recording this podcast, a good number of our Great Coaches guests have shared ideas and research that they credit as having positively impacted their own leadership techniques. We’ve also spoken to several guests from the fields of research and education who have dedicated years to uncovering the science behind successful coaching.

While there’s still no algorithm for leadership, there certainly seems to be a growing number of science-based techniques and practices that we can adopt.

If you know of any fantastic research that exists in the sports and leadership space, I’d love for you to share it with us — just as past guest Alf Galustian shared the football development philosophy behind his Coerver Coaching methodology, which you can learn about in this clip.

Looking for more inspiration? Our workshops and events deliver the insights of the Great Coaches straight to your team. They’re also tailored to the topics and issues that most impact you and your organisation, helping to boost engagement and encourage your team members to develop and build on the skills necessary for success.

For more information, get in touch today: [email protected]

Court of Gold

Another great ‘behind-the-scenes’ resource for you again this week with “Court of Gold”, a Netflix documentary looking into the 2024 USA Basketball Men’s national team’s success in Paris.

If you don’t have Netflix (or it isn’t available where you are) then this article takes us through the documentary and some of the great insights and points that it contains, such as the team’s powerful, motivational chant and the sense of duty that the players feel in the build up to their games.

Challenge Yourself with the Macquarie MBA

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