PDP Co-Founder and psychology researcher, James Vaughan, explores creativity in footballers with a focus on the coach’s perspective. What does it mean to foster creativity in players? How can we better understand the process of encouraging creative problem solving on the field? Vaughan offers practical insights and solutions to an often abstract topic. Creativity is often described as the use of imagination to invent something. Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson refines this idea by explaining creativity as ‘the process of having original ideas that have value’. The…
freedom
Freedom, what does it mean in a performance or player development environment and can it overwhelm or confuse your players? Co-founder of myfastestmile and top PDP contributor, Mark Upton shares his excellent blog post on managing this cultural and environmental shift. “You can’t get sustained exceptional performance from a controlling environment – push autonomy down the hierarchy” I’ve recently spent some time on performance cultures and environments, fortunate to be able to share experiences with a handful of exceptional people working in a range of…
Creativity involves putting ideas together in new and useful ways. Lara Mossman, Positive Psychology Researcher, football player, and mother of three, offers a refreshing and practical view on creativity. What is it, and how can we prime our young players to become more creative? Dutch legend Johan Cruyff, inventor of the ‘Cruyff Turn’ and the man behind the ‘phantom goal’, epitomised the creative footballer in the 1970s, as does today’s global superstar Lionel Messi. Cruyff was a king of improvisation, throwing out the rulebook on positioning and producing…