If there’s a single lesson that stands out from this masterclass on the power of a clean ego, it’s this: your role as a coach goes beyond tactics, technique, and improving skills—it’s about daily shaping the environment where your athletes show up, grow, and transform as people. The real coaching job is to help build a space where your players—and you—can operate with a clean ego: healthy self-confidence, hunger to improve, and relational maturity.
Why is this so fundamental?
Because at field hockey’s sharpest edge—whether you’re working with elite, youth or masters athletes—performance will always reflect the lived culture of your team. That culture is directly shaped by how you handle ego in your daily environment. When a coach models and nurtures a clean ego, that team can grow, adapt, handle pressure, and build the kind of relationships that produce not just better players but better people.
Think about your daily practices. How many times have you seen a talented athlete ruminate on mistakes, spiral downwards, or lash out after a tough loss? Or maybe you’ve noticed the “hungry” but toxic drive—the athlete whose desperate need to prove themselves ends up hurting teammates, sabotaging team culture and morale. As field hockey coaches, we see both sides: the broken ego (self-doubt, excessive self-criticism) and the unhealthy ego (dominance, selfishness).
The actionable insight: your job is to create and sustain upward spirals—not just to stop the rot or break a downward spiral. That begins by helping players separate healthy ambition from destructive rumination, and by anchoring your daily feedback, team talks, and one-on-one conversations in behaviors that reflect your team’s agreed values.
As Iain Shippey put it in the session:
“Coach, can you trigger and sustain an upward spiral?... Can we be the catalyst of an upward spiral? Are we able to notice as a teenager comes to the astronomy end of a long, hard day… Are we able to give them a foothold? Are we, like my dear friend Coach Pollo, able to have that eye contact, sense where they’re at, connect with them, be the best part of their day, affirm their skills, give them a foothold, an upward trajectory?”
The technique for this is surprisingly simple and practical:
Start every season by co-creating team values with your players, not dictating them.
Regularly discuss—on and off the pitch—what behaviors reflect those values.
In moments of stress (poor performance, conflict, loss), return to these values in your language and actions.
Acknowledge mistakes directly, but in a way that preserves each individual’s dignity and fosters their growth mindset.
Make your players feel safe enough not just to try, but also to fail—and then own those failures in a constructive, non-judgmental environment.
Using this approach in daily training means more one-on-one conversations focused on personal transformation rather than just performance. It means making deposits of relational capital—small gestures, affirmations, honest apologies—so that when you need to pull hard on the “team rope” in tense moments, it holds. Ultimately, the clean ego is about everyone in your squad being able to look themselves in the mirror after tournaments and saying they’ve grown—as players, yes, but more importantly, as people.
Why Watch the Full Session and Read More?
If you’re an experienced field hockey coach, you know there’s no magic formula—these are messy, complicated dynamics lived out every day. That’s what makes this masterclass worth watching through. The nuanced examples Iain Shippey shares—raw moments, vulnerable apologies, and team-building conversations—bring home not just theory but lived coaching wisdom. The deeper discussion is behind the paywall, exploring three key takeaways in detail with practical frameworks and direct quotes you can use—and adapt—immediately within your own teams.
