Michael Loftman is the head coach of Hout Bay United FC in South Africa.
Michael Loftman was used to cutting players as a head coach.
But the first time he parted ways with a staff member was an entirely different feeling altogether.
“I had trauma from the experience,” said Loftman, the head coach of Hout Bay United FC in South Africa. “It was probably two weeks of guilt and sadness. I never had any idea I was going to feel like that.”
Ultimately, however, Loftman looks back on the decision to let one of his assistants go as one of the most consequential of his career because it set a larger tone within his club — and provided him a valuable lesson in conflict management and establishing larger continuity.
“The preference is working in an environment where you can have full buy-in to the culture from everybody,” Loftman said. “As soon as somebody goes outside (of it), that’s always the red flag.”
Best of 7 continued its conversation with Loftman on managing personnel choices, working to become less emotional as a coach, and why it’s critical to recognize how our own insecurities cloud our judgment.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Coach, how do you come to a decision to let a staff member go?
The first thing has always been culture — not allowing people who don't fit in the culture. That’s a personal preference, because I choose that I would rather work with a very good group of players in an environment that I love and can thrive in than work with the very, very best.
From there, it’s bouncing it off of people who are a bit more sober-minded. I use the word sober, meaning calm, not influenced by a relationship. I include as many people to get feedback on that as possible — talking to the chairman of the club, talking to my colleagues, talking to some of the senior players. I lean on the players a lot with decisions about when to release someone.
But I think one of the key principles is getting as much information from as many different sources as possible to try and make the best decision, removing emotion it. Emotion is like the ego. It plays such a big role in influencing the decisions you're going to make.
I’m curious — what’s the most meaningful failure you’ve had in your career?
I’ve had a lot, but Zambia would be the easiest one to look at. I was 25, 26 years old and had I decided I didn't want to work in academies anymore. I wanted to work with senior players. I wanted to be a head coach. So, I left England, and I had never lived abroad before but moved to Zambia.
My whole life had been left for this, to try to find a role like this, and I got the role and didn't have success with it. I think we were borderline relegation when I left. There was money outstanding, and eventually I decided I wasn't going to stay. I'd sacrificed everything for it.
You'd call that a failure, but I just see it as such a great experience, like it was probably the most important experience I ever had, being in a country where you don't know anybody, you're on your own, you're trying to figure everything out. You're in the deep end. You don't really know what you're doing. But it was real deep-end learning.
What was your biggest takeaway from it?
The meaningful message for me was, you don't feel invincible — because there's ups and downs, and life can get tough — but there was this feeling of, even if I hit rock bottom, which I will at some point again, I just have this idea that I will be O.K. I will make a plan. I will find a way.
I think a lot of coaches and players and just people in general have this fear of having nothing. It drives us to stay in jobs too long when we don't need to stay in the job. It enables us to not transition in our career into something we really want to do or leave relationships when the relationship isn't the right one. I think now I just have this idea that it's going to be fine, and I'll make a plan. Don’t worry about the downside, just keep trying to make it better. You will be fine if the worst does happen.
I’ve heard you say, “Emotion rules the human brain.” What can a coach do to become less emotional?
This is really, really tough to manage, and honestly, this is probably my biggest coaching battle at the moment. People think emotion just makes you do something in terms of a physical action. But, for me, it doesn't really work like that. What I find is emotion changes my perspective and changes my attention. For example, we’re losing 1-0 in a game. My attention now turns to how can we attack to go make the game 1-1? Or we’re winning 1-0. My attention turns to how do we protect this lead?
Without even being conscious of it, I’m leaving process. But my job is to evaluate the whole process and how it's going. Now, because my attention changes, my perspective changes. I start analyzing something different. And once my perspective changes, my decision is going to change.
I'm trying to catch my emotion at the start, but I still battle that now on the sidelines in games. I don't feel like I always make the best decision, and I know why I don't make the best decision — because my attention changes.
How do you overcome that?
Recently, I've had a number of what ifs that I write down on paper. If we go to 10 men, if we go 1-0 down, if we go 1-0 up, I have notes that I use as prompts to make sure I stay on task. This is a real big thing that I'm personally trying to develop. I think it comes with experience. There’s a calmness that comes with experience. I’ve lost 100 games, I've won 100 games. The 201st isn’t going to be the biggest deal.
But when you're a bit younger, and I've done 70 games, every one still feels like the one. Every game feels like the most important one. When you're sober and calm, and I swear I use sober because it's a term that we use here, your perspective is different. Your attention is different.
It’s mature perspective but, as you said, difficult to cultivate.
I use sober a lot because it’s so relevant to emotion. When you’re sober with alcohol versus not, your perspective is different. You have a few drinks, and all of a sudden, that night feels like the most important of your life.
I think that's exactly what happens in a sports match, and sometimes even in training. We go from planning a training session based on long-term player development, long-term game model, methodology. Now, it becomes about that one action that we need to get rid of that triggers us. Our perspective is we're a rubbish team or you're a rubbish player because that specific topic is getting extra attention, and we lose holistic focus. I think that's probably the best example of emotion ruling the brain. Until you can identify your emotion and control it, your perspective and attention change, which then changes some of your behavior.
Where does insecurity fit into all of this?
You're more emotional about the things that you're emotional about within yourself. If I'm very emotional about being intelligent — and you've got to be intelligent and make good decisions in life — when someone makes a bad decision on the football pitch, I'm going to find it extremely frustrating because that's my own insecurity in myself. Therefore, you’re now reminding me of my own insecurity.
Maybe a coach is insecure about his work ethic. Then, he sees a player who doesn't run when he's meant to be running. That now triggers him. He’s got to overcompensate with his emotion. That self-awareness piece to understand why you're being triggered is really key.
My trigger is I don’t have a reputation in football through playing or through anything other than my coaching and coach education. When I play a game, even though there's a few 100 or 1,000 or whatever it is in the stadium at the time, I feel like the world is watching. I feel like everybody is judging because my reputation is not based on being a player or doing anything in the game — media punditry or whatever it is. That insecurity around me of like, am I good enough? Am I a winner? Can I win football matches? Am I the best coach?
That insecurity means that the match takes my emotion sky high, whereas with a lot of ex-players who have played the game and have a good reputation, match day is much easier to manage, because at the end of the game, if they lose, they walk away saying, “Yeah, but I won the Champions League.” They’re protected from the result.
The biggest thing is the self-awareness. What are your weaknesses? What are your insecurities? What do you get emotional about? Are they accurate and relevant?
Because a lot of the time, they aren't.
What I learned…
It’s nearly impossible to make quick, high-stakes decisions without some element of bias creeping in.
But having at least a degree of self-awareness around our emotional shortcomings — and the various triggers for our frustrations — is an important first step to at least making sure we’re not simply inventing problems.
Additionally, experience is often viewed as a positive because it means someone has seen more and has additional reference points to draw from.
But one of its more overlooked qualities is that it also provides a freedom of sorts to make mistakes, knowing that one error or poor call isn’t an indictment of larger capabilities.
Protecting ourselves from the result, as Coach Loftman put it, is a rare but extremely important mindset to cultivate in order to make better decisions.