Ben Hawkes's videos and podcasts

First time, "confident" meant loud. The kid who talks in the changing room, who takes the ball when ...

A single failed signing at Championship level can cost a club north of fifteen million pounds. Fee, ...

Coventry City is one of the academies TrueMind has worked with and where Michael Dowling-Fleet worke...

Hand a squad a questionnaire, ask them to rate their confidence out of ten, and what comes back is t...

Someone says a sixteen-year-old handles pressure well, and someone says another one will struggle wi...

When Will Mellors-Blair, Michael Dowling-Fleet and I started TrueMind, the idea was simple enough. A...

Ask an academy coach when a scholar started slipping and you will get an honest answer. Around Chris...

I never once felt poor, and people struggle with that when I tell them. They expect the story to hav...

We spent last season delivering resilience sessions across more than thirty EFL academies. At club a...

Every time a club hears "cognitive data", someone in the room quietly works out whether this is a th...

When a club says a player is resilient, what they usually mean is that he does not visibly wobble. H...

Football treats pushing a player and protecting one as a trade off, and that argument keeps the coac...

Been trying to find the number and it does not exist. We track everything else in this game. Minute...

Grand risings Bath network - does anyone know any good co-working spaces around Bath, Somerset and W...

The most common objection I get from performance directors is about time. The clubs I speak to are ...

Eyes on a swivel y'all. Stay frosty. The 2025 AI security guards are watching. #slop #behindenemylin...

I spent a long time assuming someone else had already done this properly, and that my job was to fin...

Ask a member of staff which scholars they are worried about and you will get names quickly. Usually ...

Someone flags a centre-back whose numbers are down and there is a plan for him by the time the coffe...

If you are building anything that a coach has to use on a Tuesday morning, get someone in the room w...

A club sends a nineteen-year-old out for half a season. The conversation before he goes is about min...

Me after a good investor pitch for TrueMind. Will Mellors-Blair Michael Dowling-Fleet

I do not have a clean answer to this yet. When a board reviews academy spend, they are looking at t...

A single test tells you almost nothing, and that is worth saying out loud, because it is the objecti...

Open an academy player's individual development plan and scroll to the mental section. "Needs more ...

I have sat in front of performance dashboards with forty-odd metrics on them and said nothing. Heart...

We could have built twelve subscales. The literature would have supported it. We built three. Cogni...

I have tried to remember the last gig and I cannot. No final show, no goodbye. Somewhere in that yea...

Then the hamstring goes on the Saturday and nobody on the staff is sure whether it was load or somet...

Counsellors, sport psychologists, mental health first aid mostly sit under welfare, which means the ...