Beyond The Box: Goalkeeping’s Untold Mindset, Mistakes and Madness
The mindset. The mistakes. The madness. This is football’s last line of defence - unfiltered. From iconic saves to brutal setbacks, Beyond the Box ® dives into the stories goalkeepers rarely tell, and no one else dares to.
Beyond The Box: Goalkeeping’s Untold Mindset, Mistakes and Madness
Listener Mailbag Vol. 1 | "What Do I Do When No One Believes in Me?"
In our first Listener Mailbag episode, we answer YOUR questions on confidence, mental reset after mistakes, overcoming self-doubt, and building belief when it feels like no one believes in you.
If you want to be part of a future episode, email your questions to beyond@theoneglove.com and join the conversation.
Today's Beyond the Box episode is a little bit different. So we've asked you for your questions and we want to answer them. We think these episodes are massively important because sometimes you need to learn too, you need to understand why this stuff is so important rather than just listening to the guests. So I'm going to question KP. KP's going to question me. We hope you like it. So the first question we had is you've had a bad game. How do you get over it?
SPEAKER_03:Oh, you had a bad game, how'd you get over it? The first thing that you can do after having a bad game is highlight all the things that you've done well in the game. So naturally, as a goalkeeper, whenever something goes wrong in the game or you've made mistakes, your brain is going to want to focus on all of the things that you've done wrong. Human habit. Like we always want to identify threats to our future. But actually, there's always things in the game that you've done well. So even if you have made a mistake and it's cost the team three points or a point, there'll be things in the game that you've done really, really well. So grab a piece of paper or a journal, write the date, write the name of the opposition, and write down every single thing that you did really well in that game. And then you can go and address the mistakes and look at the mistakes and analyze them and take feedback from them. Feedback is the most important thing. Learning from mistakes is the most important thing. But if you only focus on the negatives, you get into this cycle and this habit of only focusing on things that go wrong. You actually sometimes need to celebrate the positives because not everything's going to be negative in the game. So I would always say highlight the wins, highlight the things that you've done well, then go through the things that you need to improve on and work out a plan for training for that week. Once that one hour's past after the game, focus on the next game. Focus on the next action. Focus on what you want to go and do in the next week of training because you can't control the past, but you can control how you want to influence the future. That's how I would go about it. What about you?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, you just said everything, mate. Same thing, I was at have you had a bad game or have you had a bad moment? Oh, that's nice. So I think sometimes we generalize and say, I've had a bad game. You've had a bad moment, might have conceded a goal. But is it a is it a bad game? I think you have to question it. And like you said, you can go into feedback or judgment. So I'd be asking specific questions, for example, what went well today? What could I improve on? How do I go about doing that? And then you can look at the the feedback on how you can improve rather than the judgment. And then you're, as you said, writing everything down, all the things that you did well, because you can't have one side without the other, can you? We say it all the time. Can't have praise without criticism, you can't have winning without losing, good without, bad, paradoxically without helps with ups without downs. Yeah, and it's the same thing. We expect it all one-sided, right? So we expect the good, we expect praise, we expect success, but you're gonna have failure, you're gonna have judgment, you're gonna have all the other side too. And it's how you deal with it. So that bad moment, when you have the bad game, it can actually be a breakthrough point for you, right? So the pros that we work with, you see the elites, they have a bad game, a quote-unquote bad game, but they go, oh, amazing! I've just made this mistake, I can reflect on that, go through it, and that's not gonna happen again. So they just see things in a different light. We talk about optimism, right? They're optimistic, and optimism for me is a key skill of being an elite performer, not getting yourself down. You've had a bad game. Isn't I always say when the pros work with me, they go, I had a bad game. I was like, do you expect to play every game really well? What do you expect? Like, do you expect everything to go really well? Do we expect every podcast to go really well? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:No, but that that's that's a big thing that you taught me as well. It's about understanding your relationship with failure. So a lot of pros have an unbelievable relationship with failure because they know at some stage they're going to get it wrong. And rather than seeking the judgment in things, they look for the feedback. And when you know that you're going to get something wrong and that things are not always going to go to plan, it allows you to overcome that situation a lot quicker because you've already pre-planned for it in your head. Acceptance mentality. So like it's out of my head. But we're we're big on that, aren't we? Like whenever we're working with goalkeepers, pros especially, even younger goalkeepers, a lot of people say, Oh, well, it's negative to think about mistakes. It's negative to pre-plan for things to go wrong. Well, actually, it's your biggest superpower because if you've pre-planned for something to happen and then it does happen, your brain isn't going to go into that panic mode. It's going to just respond and move on to the next action. But if you haven't planned for it, you're going to dwell on it. The emotions are going to eat you up. You're going to start worrying about judgment, and it's going to hold you in that moment in time rather than moving forward. So, yeah, I think going back to your original question around how do you move on from a bad game? I actually think it starts before the bad game happens. Telling yourself that it might happen at some stage, so that when it does, you've got systems, you've got skills that you can go to to overcome it.
SPEAKER_00:So instead of a bad game, next question: what does a mental reset look like after you've made a mistake? We've had people talk about what can mental resets be.
SPEAKER_03:There's so many. I think the first thing I should say is that everyone has their own method. Like there's not one thing that you can say to somebody that will work for everybody. It's about experimenting, it's about trying things out, reflecting on how you feel in the moment when you use these techniques. Because every single goalkeeper that I've worked with is different. Some goalkeepers that I've worked with like to restrap their gloves. Others like to go and get a drink of water or wipe their gloves on the towel. Some of them pull up their socks, some of them use things like self-talk, where they've got trigger words that we've created that allow them to go back to words that describe them when they're at their best.
SPEAKER_00:Could you give examples of some trigger words?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So, for example, like one thing that we talk about a lot in the Keeper's Edge program is about game face. So three words that describe you when you're at your best. Well, if you have a formula for what you're like when you're at your best, that triggers memories and emotions in your mind that remind you of that game. So when you make a mistake in a match, you can go back and say those three words. So my three words when I'm playing are confident, dominant, and aggressive. When I played my best ever match, I can remember it's against Barnett many, many years ago now at Stephen Hidge's training ground, made loads of saves in that game. Three words that described me in that game were confident, dominant, and aggressive. I was confident in my decision making and the way I played the game with my body language. I was dominant of my area and the people in front of me with my communication. And I was really aggressive with my start position. So whenever I make mistakes now in games, or whenever I'm coaching people and helping people, I'm saying repeat those three words to yourself after you make a mistake. The ball goes in the goal. Go back to your three words. And all of a sudden, those three words give you a plan of what you want to go and do for the rest of the game, gives you a focus, gives you a gives you a framework. So that's one technique that you could use. I think there's other ones like the behaviors that we spoke about, reset behaviors, restrapping your gloves. I think ultimately, again, it comes back down to doing the work before the game, understanding that you're going to make a mistake in the game. Get to acceptance as quick as you can. Do the work early. Do the work early. So that that's what I've done. What about you?
SPEAKER_00:I just want to pick up on something that happened to you. Go on. As you were talking about that. So as you said your three words, you can wind this back if you want to have a look and watch KP's eyes. So he went, you went, you visualized that game. I did. You was you was actually replaying that game in your head, and you was replaying them saves in your head, and your whole face changed, and you were smiling as you went into it, right?
SPEAKER_03:So I mean I can remember it so vividly. I can actually tell you all the key saves that I made. There was one that I tipped onto the bar, there's a 1v1 save down the middle of the goal, and there was one on the angle.
SPEAKER_00:You was replaying them in your head, wasn't it? You were talking about it, and you smiled, you smiled there. Really good reset there. Smile. Smile. It changes it, it changes everything. You can have them three words, but just smile. I think it's one of Djokovic's resets. Just smile, or he has an outburst. And it's like, next point. That's done. Next point. You can use them, but the smile there, your whole demeanor, it was really interesting to watch. So that was really cool.
SPEAKER_03:So psychoanalysing me.
SPEAKER_00:But it was really cool to watch because you see you can see that. You brought up the images, the images made you feel good. Same as things that you can do for you. You can have a reset, three words could be a trigger deeper, go into anchors and stuff, and then it will make you feel a certain way. So it's really, really interesting. But exactly what you I can't really add much on to that, can I? But exactly the same. The only one I'd think I'd add on is probably maybe smile. It can be drink, smile, think of one of three things that you did well back into it. Goldfish memory, as Ted Lasso would say.
SPEAKER_03:I used to like the Ben Foster one, actually. He used to laugh, didn't he? Like he'd make a mistake, and because it was so ridiculous, the mistake that he'd make sometimes. He'd just start laughing. And like that, laughing, smiling, it releases endorphins, doesn't it? It releases chemicals into your brain that make you feel good. So in a moment where you should feel bad, you start feeling good. And it's like your brain can't comprehend that. So it allows you to go and play the game the way that you want to with enjoyment, which is the most important thing. That's why you play football. Indeed. You play, play football.
SPEAKER_00:Deeper. We can go into that later on. How do you build self-belief when no one believes in you?
SPEAKER_03:How do you build self-belief when no one believes in you?
SPEAKER_00:I think that's one seems to believe in you. And first question is I'd be like, You know what I'm gonna say to this, don't you?
SPEAKER_03:Going back to your your own evidence. Is it actually true? Belief systems.
SPEAKER_00:No one actually believes in you. Is it true? Is it actually true? No. Because no one believes because if no one seems to believe in you, is it true? Is that your perception? You don't believe in yourself, you're projecting it onto others. So how do you build self-belief when no one seems to believe in you?
SPEAKER_03:I go back to my own evidence systems. I would. Like there were times in the dressing room where I knew the lads weren't having me. Or maybe they did, maybe they didn't, who knows? But in my own mind, I convinced myself that they weren't having me and they didn't trust me. So then in those moments, it's going back into the past and saying, well, when's a time where I've been through this before? And how did I get through it then? Well, there were times in the past when I was at Wickham where I'd made mistakes in games and lost the trust of the dressing room, 100%. But then how did I get out of it? Well, I kept trying to do the right things. I kept trying to play high. I kept trying to catch the ball when I could easily parry. I kept communicating. I kept showing up and creating angles and trying to be involved in the game. I think when you go back to doing the things that you do that got you out of the rut previously, it gives you a framework of what you want to go and do in that present moment to get through that challenging situation. But ultimately, the opinions of other people in the grand scheme of things are irrelevant. The most important opinion that you can ever have is the one that you have of yourself. And in football, because there's so many people with an opinion, you almost have to have a filter in your head of which voices you want to listen to. Like the goalie coach might be important because he's giving you feedback, but most of the time, a manager's not always going to understand goalkeeping. The players aren't going to understand goalkeeping. So you have to rely on your goalie coach and yourself to come to the right conclusions about situations. So going back to your original question around how do you build what was it? How do you build trust in yourself? How do you build self-belief? How do you build self-belief?
SPEAKER_00:No one seems to believe in you.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, the answer is going back to your evidence bank of the past. You go back to the past and you say, what evidence do I have that I can get through this? What evidence do I have that I've coped with this in the past? And you take that form in it and you apply it to the present. That's how I would do it. What about you? Deep question.
SPEAKER_00:It is a deep question. How do I build self-belief? So I would question that person who's asked that question. Because I've had this with a player before and they've had no self-belief or belief. So like how do I build belief in myself? Like do it without belief. Just do it anyway. Create the belief as you go, because even if you if you use the words how do I build belief, it's built, right? You build, you need to start stacking it up. So I'd I'd say you don't no one starts with belief, really. It starts with we talk about all the time, courage. So just why don't you just do it anyway? Why don't you just go? So how do you build your self-belief? You have courage, you build that stack of evidence, you prepare, and then I think it comes from building the confidence as well. So you build confidence by really simple things. Really simple things. Write down three wins a day. Really simple. Five wins a day. Start with three, three wins a day. Because self-belief comes from confidence. So you have to start, it's the same thing. Self-belief, confidence, kind of do you think?
SPEAKER_03:Confidence and self-belief, yeah, I do. Well, confidence is defined as your belief in your ability to execute in a specific task or situation. So technically speaking, self-belief is a form of confidence.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so we remember that video we did the other day when we did the confidence workshop, and it's your skill mapped against the challenge. So your perceived skill mapped against the challenge. So that it's actually going, okay, let's build a bank of evidence, like you said. Start starting easy. Everyone wants to do this big sexy thing, I think. Don't you think? They want to do the big sexy thing rather than just start with the basics and get the basics right, and no one does it. No one does it, no one writes three wins, five wins a day. Me and you do. We do, we do, but that's just stacking evidence in your favor. So you're stacking evidence even if you have a quote unquote bad day, that you're stacking evidence going, what went well? Why? How to make further progress with it? They're the questions we ask ourselves every day, right? So I'd be asking questions. First thing I'll do is I'll start with the the first block. What's the first block? Create confidence in yourself by stacking evidence in your favour. Next block we prepare. So it might be like habit stacking. So habit stack. Create because most people want to do they want to do everything at once, right? They want to do everything rather than just one thing at a time. So just start easy and add layer upon layer. It's a deep question. How do you build self-belief? If you want to build self-belief, you have to start with what's the first thing you need to do. And for me, that's writing down three to five wins, not just in football, on and off the pitch.
SPEAKER_03:I I I agree with you. Like I had I have this pro that I work with, and he keeps a log of all his games. So he's played hundreds of games. So he's got this book that he writes, well, multiple books now. But he writes, again, he writes the opposition and he writes all the things, or I think three to five things that he did really well in the game. One thing that he'd like to work on, and how he's going to action that in training, and he'll colour code it. So from zero to five out of ten is an amber, five to seven out of ten is a green, seven to ten out of ten is a blue. And whenever he's going through a low period in his career, he'll go back to the book and he'll look for trends in the colours. Where was I blue and green the most? Oh, well, it was this period here. What was I doing in those games? Oh, well, my communication was really good. My start position was really good. I was reading the game, I was in that flow state. It gives you a bank of evidence to go back to, right? Success leaves clues. It does.
SPEAKER_00:It does leave clues. We don't write it down. If we have no data, we're guessing. And what's the saying? Data beats drama. And if you don't have the data, you create drama.
SPEAKER_03:That's the problem. A lot of people are not proactive enough to do something like that. They'll just go through the games. They'll play it. It is hard, but it's also easy. It's easy to sit down after a game for five minutes and write stuff down. But the hard part is the consistency and the habit of doing it. A lot of people are happy to do it once or twice, but when you ask yourself to be consistent with it, it's challenging. It's like us, we journal every day, right? Most days. Most days. But there are days where you wake up and you're like, oh, I can't be bothered. But you know the benefit of doing it is consistency. So you do it because you know in the long run it's going to pay off. But when you go through those dips of not wanting to do it, that's data that you're missing out on.
SPEAKER_00:So you need discipline.
SPEAKER_03:You do.
SPEAKER_00:Not motivation. I think that's where people get confused. They think they need motivation, but motivation follows discipline. So it's discipline first, motivation follows. People think it's motivation first, and then it's discipline. It doesn't. If anyone, example, a real easy example is weight loss. Don't really get, you're not motivated first. You're not motivated to go to the gym. You're not motivated to go out for a run in the cold. You're not motivated to eat healthy. You do it, you start seeing results, and you're like, oh my god, this feels good. And then you get motivated. So for you, whatever it is in goalkeeping, it could be the journaling, writing things down. It's not easy, it's not easy. If any if any of this was easy, everyone would be doing it. But they but they do not. And one of my key sayings is simple isn't easy. Simple because simple isn't easy. Simple's hard because we want the bad habit. We have bad habits that feel good. So instead of doing that journaling, they will or writing things down, like the color coding, it would be TikTok or Instagram, scrolling. And people go, I haven't got the time. You haven't got the time. You haven't got the time. Just that that's more important to you at that time.
SPEAKER_03:It's not a priority.
SPEAKER_00:It's not a priority. It's easier to do that than it is that. And I get I get it. I get we get it. Because we do the same thing because we're human, we're human, right? So it's it's I'm gonna use so many phrases, choosing your hearts. Simple isn't easy, but that's how you remember things. Simple isn't easy to choose, choose your hards, choose your hards wisely because if you do what is easy, things in the long run would be hard. If you do what is hard, things in the long run would be easy. And it's the same process for this. So building self-belief sometimes is simple over time and it compounds, and then when people don't believe in you, you've already got that evidence in your favour, so you're going to not have that one. Like people could say things to me about certain things, and if I have that self belief it it wasn't wouldn't faze me. It'd be fine. I've got the evidence in my favour. You're a terrible mindset coach, for example. I'd be like, That's not true, is it?
SPEAKER_03:Results speak for themselves.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I've got the I've got the results, I've got the evidence to back that up, and it's fine. If I just started, I'd be like, Well, I probably haven't stacked that evidence yet, have I? I haven't stacked that evidence in my favour. Then you need courage. Then I need courage. Yeah, that's exactly it. You need the courage to go out there. Last question for today, and it's a really good one. What's the biggest mental battle you've ever faced as a keeper? And how did you handle it?
SPEAKER_03:Jesus Christ. That is an unbelievable question. The biggest mental battle I face as a goalkeeper. I remember, I won't say the club, but I was at a club, I was signed, and I had torn two ligaments in my ankle. They were completely torn. Grade two, grade three tears. So I shouldn't have been playing. I got told that if I didn't play in the games, there's a good chance I was going to get released. So I had to play the best part of half a season with two ankle ligaments torn, knowing that in every game that I played in, I was going to be in unbearable pain. And it was in my left foot as well. So the standing foot when I was kicking. And I remember every day I woke up before a game, I just knew I was going to play in a game which I'd previously enjoyed, knowing that for 90 minutes I was going to be in agony and I wasn't going to be able to kick properly. But then I used to go in the games and I used to take goal kicks. And because every time I planted my foot, I would just be in agony. I couldn't kick properly. Then I started to have to deal with the judgment from the players and the dressing room because they didn't know the situation, but the medical staff knew. So I'm getting judged by all the players, I'm getting criticized by all the players. I then started developing the self-belief or the belief system that I couldn't kick and that kicking was a weakness of mine, even though it would have previously been a strength. Then I'm dealing with like parents and play uh other people watching the games, and my dad's stood on the side of the pitch, and he's hearing things like, Why can't this goalkeeper kick? Now no one else knew what I was going through, no one else knew what I was struggling with, except a handful of people who didn't share it with everybody. And it broke me, like proper broke me. And it wasn't until I left that club and started doing rehab and then going and playing at a different level that I started to rebuild my confidence in my kicking and started to rebuild my confidence in myself because I went through a period of just believing I was a shit goalkeeper that couldn't kick and that was letting everyone down. And it's really hard because no one ever knows the struggles that you go through as an individual. They just see the outcome, which is a poor goal kick or a mistake or failure. So that was one of the hardest periods of my career. That was a good four or five month period of having to do that. And it got to the point where I put my ankle through so much wear that I'd actually needed surgery, but I'd left it so long that I'd no longer needed surgery and the ligaments had half healed themselves. I've still got loads of scar tissue in there, still in pain, but like it was just horrible.
SPEAKER_00:This is why you struggled at park run.
SPEAKER_03:Yes. I do struggle though. I still struggle with my kicking. Like I'm in pain when I kick because I probably should have had the surgery back then. But yeah, I was just in agony, mate. Agony. And it wasn't the physical agony, it was the mental agony of knowing what I was capable of and not being able to deliver it. That's what hurt me the most. And then knowing that I shouldn't have been playing, but I had to. It wasn't I wanted, I had to play. I didn't have a choice. So that that was a tough period. How did I get through that?
SPEAKER_00:You took the words out of my mouth, I was gonna ask you that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:God knows. Um, I think sometimes you get forced into positions in football where you just have to find a way to get through it. You find the way, you don't realize what the method was, but you just find the way to get through it. So you turn up, you show up first and foremost, you accept that you're gonna be in pain, you accept that you're going through a difficult period, and you grind your way through it and you accept the conditions, you accept the hand that you've been dealt, and you try and find a way to give the best value that you can based upon the hand that you've been dealt. You know it's not gonna be perfect, you know that you're not gonna get much praise or much joy from what you're doing, but you go through it anyway. I think that's one thing that a lot of people don't realize about footballers and goalkeepers in particular. Most of them are not playing 100% fit, most of them are playing with aches, pains, niggles, things they should have had surgery on, even like mental health and well-being. A lot of them are.
SPEAKER_00:I've asked many of pros this. How many of you play it 100%? Don't think I've ever had any player say, Oh yeah, I'm always 100% fit.
SPEAKER_03:So yeah, and people don't realize it, but when you're not fit, you don't actually play the game with freedom like you would do if you are fit. Like even with my kicking, for example, there was 100% times in games where I'd hold back on my kicking that would impact the distance. Sometimes it would it would go low. So there was no consistency to it. Whereas if I was 100% pain-free, I'd be absolutely fine. I'm not saying I'm the best kicker in the world, but I get it to a certain area. So your game gets impacted, your enjoyment gets impacted, your happiness gets impacted when you're playing and you're not 100% fit. So people don't, again, people don't see what's going on up here. All they know is the outcome of things because that's what they get to see. But a lot of players suffer in silence because they they can't change their circumstance. So yeah, that was that was a really tough moment in my career. And I remember saying to my dad, Dad, I'm I'm struggling like physically, but I didn't have I didn't have a choice. I had to keep playing, otherwise, I was gonna get released. Got told that I was gonna get released. So yeah, it was tough, mate. Really, really tough. But it builds you. So now it's an experience, it's a story that I can share with other people, and that empowers people to to help themselves, hopefully.
SPEAKER_00:I think it's good to see that even though we do this, we all struggle. There's we all we all have doubts, we all have fears, we all think we're not good enough at points, we all struggle with some self-belief a little bit, and that's completely normal. So for anyone listening, and if you're thinking, oh, I'm struggling with my confidence, I'm gonna tell you now we all do. All the pros do, the pros that you talk to, all this we're all in the same position. So yeah, I think it's really good to know that even though we do that we do this, we we all struggle all the time. So yeah. Perfect. Hope you've enjoyed this episode, little QA.
SPEAKER_01:See you soon.