Leading from the Back: What helped shape Houghton’s leadership style | OneFootball

Steph Houghton has revealed how her inspiring leadership style was moulded thanks to the help of a sports psychologist in her recently released autobiography.

City’s legendary former captain explained in Leading from the Back which was released earlier this month and is available to purchase in all major bookshops as well as in the City Store.

The Club have been given permission to publish extracts from the book, with Houghton already reflecting on her move to City in 2014, conversations with Pep Guardiola around coaching and coming up against a teenage Phil Foden in training sessions.

And in the latest instalment, she details her initial struggle when being named England captain and how the guidance from a psychologist influenced her on and off the pitch.

After being given the Lionesses’ armband in April 2014, the 2015 World Cup represented the first major tournament Houghton would lead her country in.

Before then though, she admits in Leading from the Back her initial difficulties in the position which were noticed by her country’s coaching staff.

That led to the appointment of a sports psychologist which helped our former defender break down the role and clearly identify the leader she wanted to be.

Houghton then implemented this in 2015’s major tournament where England finished third after beating Germany in the play-off following their semi-final appearance – and across the remainder of her illustrious career.

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Read the full extract below…

At the time we’d been working with a sports psychologist, and he was big on getting me to only focus on the things that I could control.

After I got the captaincy, there were maybe a few questions asked within the group, and also by the public. Maybe she’s a little bit too young, hasn’t got enough experience, that type of thing. And when you say you don’t read all that kind of stuff, well you do. I read it and my family are telling me about it as well. Maybe it’s a bad thing, but I think it’s better to know than not to know. So I think I tried to be everybody’s mate. I tried too hard when I was playing, instead of concentrating on what I was learning at City and what I was learning at England. The manager and the staff had shown great faith in terms of giving me the opportunity. And I think Mark was really good at sensing things. He knew when I wasn’t really being myself. So we brought a psychologist in, who massively influenced my career and the way that I am as a person, and brought back things that I didn’t really think about myself. I remember him sitting down with me and asking what I wanted to be as a captain. Obviously, I wanted to lead by example. I wanted to show that I cared for people. This was at St George’s. But he would always have to pull me in for a chat. I would never go to him, and I think that was his biggest bugbear – I should have really approached him.

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At first, I wouldn’t really talk. He asked me to strip down what I wanted to be as a captain, but also what I wanted to be as a player. Having those conversations, those hard conversations, was exactly what I needed at the time. I wasn’t really open, but he had such a special way of letting me explain how I felt. And obviously, the player that I am, I always pressure myself to be the best, and I wanted to be the best straight away, whereas I need to realise it was going to be a bit of a journey, I was going to make mistakes along the way, and it was going to be uncomfortable at times. But the only person I needed to prove myself to was me. I didn’t need to prove myself to anybody else. The way it worked in camp, we would train, we would have meetings, I would be called in for leadership meetings, I would never really have time for myself. I was here, there and everywhere, so the psychologist got me to write down what I could control. We called it the bubble.

Before the third- place game against Germany I wrote down what my jobs were attacking, what my jobs were defensively, and what my leadership duties were. And I put them in a bubble of, like, OK, this is what I can control. To see it on a piece of paper really helped me focus on stuff. But also, on the outside of the bubble, I had the media, fans, family, my teammates, the manager. They were things I really couldn’t control. I had a little book, and every time I went into a meeting, I’d write all these notes down. Tactics, this was my way of preparing, knowing I had all this information. So, before I put my tracksuit on, I’d sit down on my bed and I put my bubble in this book. I’d rip the page out, go and get a shower, go to the game, and I’d always have the piece of paper in my bag. On the way to the stadium, I’d read the piece of paper, and that was my way of being able to develop but also concentrate on myself instead of thinking about what everybody else thought of me.

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That really had a massive influence on how I developed as a leader, my communication style, and how I could be with people. And also the psychologist was really positive, which helped me. I really got more confident with the positivity and the feedback that I had, because sometimes in these environments, you don’t really get as much feedback as you probably should. And, being captain, you don’t get it from the girls. I needed to lean on the staff a little bit more, to have them say that I’d done a good job here, or maybe I could do that a little bit there. So in terms of that journey, that was probably the biggest influence in terms of leadership that I had.