How to Deal with Conflict in Football
Welcome to the latest issue of The Football Scientist.
In this week's issue, I will be discussing how to deal with conflict in a football environment.
I hope you enjoy!
The Problem
Football is a high pressure environment.
It can easily chew someone up and spit them back out without much aftercare.
A natural element of working in performance sport is conflict.
Conflict can manifest in a number of different forms. Conflict with a player. Conflict with the coaching staff. Conflict between the sports science and medicine department.
If handled in the wrong way, conflict can lead to deterioration of relationships, mental stress and impaired career development.
So, how can we ensure we handle conflict in the correct way to minimize any lasting damage?
The Solution
I would highly recommend reading "The Chimp Paradox" by Prof Steve Peters.
In his book, Prof Peters talks about the brain having two ways of dealing with conflict:
1) The 'human' reaction: This part of the brain thinks and acts based on facts.
2) The 'inner chimp' reaction: This part of the brain acts based on feelings and emotions.
Often the Inner Chimp dominates our natural response to conflict.
We see this all the time with people driving cars and the classic road rage response.
But in order to effectively negotiate conflict, we must ensure our 'human' side of the brain controls our inner chimp.
We also have a third aspect to the brain which Prof Peters terms 'The Computer'.
The Computer stores information and past experiences. This is crucial when we are trying to learn from past mistakes when dealing with conflict.
For most people, the hardest part of actually recognizing when your inner chimp has taken control of your responses.
Once you become aware of this, you can begin to engage the mind and switch back to the human side.
Techniques to improve this include:
- Stepping back from a situation and taking time to reflect
- Reframing negative thoughts
- Practicing active listening
- Clear non-threating communication
Dealing with conflict requires long term commitment for improvement. It's doesn't happen overnight.
The next time you have to deal with conflict, think about the human vs chimp response and learn to control your emotions.
Thank you for reading, see you next week.
Whenever you're ready, check out how I can help you further:
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