To my mind, soccer coaching (and coaching any team sport for that matter) is one of the toughest professions (or hobbies) in the world. As a coach, you deal with a squad of players who have different hopes, dreams, values, experiences, backgrounds, worries, fears, expectations, personalities and beliefs (to name a few). It is your job to help players get the very most from their games as individuals and as a team. This puts the soft skills of confidence, belief, focus, emotion, communication and motivation at the heart of the coaching process.

My new book, Soccer Brain, is for coaches of the beautiful game and aims to help you, the coach, develop world-class player mindsets and a winning soccer team. It’s a follow up to my first book Soccer Tough and over the next few months, I will give you snippets from the book and outline simple ways to help the mindsets of your players.

As I say in Soccer Brain:

To me mindset and culture are analogous to the importance of soil and water to a plant. A plant won’t grow and bloom the most beautiful flowers if you don’t use the right soil type and you fail to water it on a regular basis. Similarly, your players won’t develop and perform if you don’t have the right coaching culture in place and the right strategies to develop both your mindset and the mindset of your players.

Mindset and coaching culture are the hidden mediators of success as a coach. They are the silent determinants of improvement and development. To me if there is such a thing as ‘the secret’ of coaching it is "Mindset and Coaching Culture."

Soccer Brain introduces the reader to four different cultures: a culture of creativity, a culture of confidence, a culture of commitment and a culture of cohesion. These are the culture I believe a coach should strive to build and maintain if he or she is to improve players as individuals and build winning teams.

Chapter One reinforces the notion that your initial qualifications are only your entry point into coaching. It uses as its model the greatest of all coaches, the late John Wooden. From Soccer Brain:

Modern day soccer demands life-long learning. The soccer coach is no longer a baby sitter or a drill instructor. The game challenges coaches to keep up with contemporary methodologies, sport science and talent development. I love the fact that Jose Mourinho has a degree in sport science! He has shaped some of the coaching concepts he currently uses at Spanish giants Real Madrid from the modules he studied at University. I love the fact that current Nottingham Forest manager Billy Davies has a video analysis studio built into his home in Scotland! It’s his games room – his version of a child’s dream space. I love the fact that Sam Allardyce, manager of West Ham in the 2012-13 season has a lifelong commitment to sport science! Everywhere Sam has coached he has utilised a sport psychologist to help improve his team’s chances of winning. I love the coaches who dedicate themselves to leaving no stone left unturned in order to develop themselves and cultivate a creative culture at their club.

Never limit yourself. The coaches I’ve mentioned above don’t. John Wooden never did. The paper that documents your qualification is not your coaching process nor is it your coaching mind. It is not your coaching life. Learning is imperative – not just from the coaches of the past but also from cutting edge research. What is coaching impossible today will become coaching possible tomorrow.

One of the challenges I lay down for readers of Soccer Brain is to break the game down into small components and take a microscopic view of the game and the players in front of them. I believe that a soccer coach who has techniques, philosophies and options for the minute details of the game will help his or her players develop more quickly, and win more games.

What should a soccer player focus on when trying to score in order to produce optimal power and direction? Should it be the ball or should it be a specific target? Or perhaps the focus should be on an element of technique such as keeping her head over the ball? Maybe it’s different for different players? For example, I worked with an English League 2 player who was on a barren run of scoring. When I asked him what he focused on as he struck the ball the player said that he tried to steer the ball into the corners of the goal. On further enquiry he was doing this because a coach had instructed him to do so - a few years previously.

As we spoke it became obvious that this was partly where his problems stemmed from. When he was a free scoring teenager he instinctively knew where the goal was – that was the easy part. At that time his focus was on the strike of the ball. He would simply exert his energy on getting a great strike on the ball and let the outcome take care of itself. The coach who came along and changed his focus had done so to the detriment of his game – his shots now lacked power and authority, and he had little confidence in, and around, the penalty box. Part of the process of improvement we worked on was for this player to get back to focusing on a great strike of the ball. He had to trust his instincts again. He knew where the goal was – that was never going to move. He had to strike the ball and let the result take care of itself.

The best coaches are such because they break their sport down. They look at the intricacies, the small inches and the 1 percent that will make the difference. They go by this philosophy – small differences in process leads to big differences in performance. And big differences in performance leads to changes in outcome. That is a lovely equation for any coach.

Dan Abrahams is a sport psychology consultant who specializes in soccer. Abrahams joins the National Soccer Coaches Association of America to share his insights into soccer psychology. All thoughts and opinions in this regular feature are that of Dan Abrahams and not necessarily reflective of the NSCAA. You can find out more about his new book "Soccer Tough" at danabrahams.com.

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