I think the time, that I gave one of the children in the street some Lei and he then pulled out a massive number of notes, rolled them up, put them in his pocket, smiled and walked off, he had more money than me!!

1, 2, 3 aah! 1,2,3,4,aah!!!! 1,2,3,4,5,6,aaaaah!!

That is my son when he is practising keepy uppys! Frustration mixed with joy when he manages to keep it going.

It's great to see a young boy and the concentration and effort he is putting in, really great to see.

There are four stages of learning a new skill:

Unconscious incompetence - This is when you do not have a clue how to do it and it is just so hard!!!

Conscious incompetence -  This is when you know a little about it, enough to know that you can't do it!

Conscious competence - This is when you are beginning to master the skill but it still takes all of your effort and attention

Unconscious competence - This is where, through all of your efforts, you have mastered the new skill and it is totally automatic.

I am sure you are all familiar with these stages. The point I want to make today is that a lot of people give up at the second stage, the stage where they begin to understand the skill but think they will never, ever master it.

You have to get through this stage!! Keep going - Practice and Persistence are the key.  All of the worlds great players were born with certain natural characteristics and then they practiced and practiced and practiced and then when they thought they couldn't practice any more do you know what they did? They practiced some more!!!

Catch you later

Mark

When I was a kid and I wanted to see my favourite players I would have to wait for Saturday night and hope that I could catch a glimpse of them on Match of the Day, the UK’s biggest soccer programme, but only being young and the show being on at 10.30pm sometimes I would fall asleep and miss it!

This was devastating! There were no videos so we could not tape the show, so I had missed it! It was gone forever! I would have to wait another week to try and catch a piece of my heroes.

As for seeing players who played in other countries, w ll that was a case of waiting for the European competitions which happened possibly every month or waiting for the big tournaments like the World Cup and the European Championships, once every four years!

But you guys today! You have it all! There is wall to wall Soccer! 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, what a dream!

I think one of the best things you have now is Youtube -  www.youtube.com , if you want to see any of the truly great players you can just click in their name and see them in all their glory.

Maradona, Pele, Cruyff, van Basten, Platini, Best, Beckham, Gullit, Ronaldo the list is endless.

These are the guys that make you want to get the ball out and practice those skills we have been talking about, these players are what the game is all about.

Get on YOUTUBE and check them out!

Catch you later

Let’s talk a little about practice.

Every training session you have is practice for the next match, you must always be thinking of the next match, because that is what you will be judged on.

Practice makes perfect as the saying goes. Now I don’t know if that is true, whatever you are practising may not end up being perfect, but it will definitely end up a lot better than when you first started.

Just a little note on that saying though, when you are practising a skill or a technique it is vital that you have been shown the correct method and way to perform it because if the person who showed you has given you bad information you will spend a lot of time and effort practising the wrong way and you will end up being very good at doing something very wrong!!

So you need to make sure you get yourself a good coach who can show you the skills and techniques.

The rest is down to you.

On this blog and in my ebooks (see right) I refer a lot to the power of your mind and how you can influence yourself and your play by your thoughts.

From my experience many coaches and players do not pay enough attention to what is going on in their heads and this is maybe where the biggest mistakes are made.

There is a saying that “you are what you believe yourself to be”.

I’ll leave you to think about that and we’ll come back to it later .

Mark