What goalkeepers taught me about bravery, pressure and performance
“You do not get the upside of visible roles without accepting the downside of exposure.”
At a recent event in Germany at which I was speaking, I had the pleasure of talking to a former Premier League and international goalkeeper who is still considered a legend at a certain north London club.
At one point, I started teasing him about the fact that goalkeepers have a reputation for being a bit unusual. You know the stereotype. A little unpredictable, often a bit highly strung, and not ‘wired the same way’ as the rest of the team. He looked at me and said, very matter-of-factly,
“Yes, but we have to be brave.”
That stopped me, because he was right. He was not just talking about throwing his body at someone’s feet or launching himself towards the top corner. He was talking about putting his reputation on the line, because a goalkeeper lives under a more intense spotlight.
A striker can make a number of mistakes, give the ball away, disappear for long periods then score one deflected goal, and still be described as the hero.
A goalkeeper can have an otherwise excellent game, make one visible mistake, and suddenly that one moment becomes the story.
That same dynamic exists far beyond football. It existed in hostage negotiation. And it exists in business.
Some roles are simply more exposed than others. The margin for error feels smaller. The mistakes feel more public. The consequences feel more personal. That pressure can make people look more intense, more reactive and occasionally more eccentric than those around them. Not because they are less capable, but because they are standing closer to the consequences.
I saw versions of that in hostage negotiation. Thankfully, I was never asked to dive full length at the feet of an angry man wearing studs, but I did work in situations where calm, judgement and communication carried an enormous amount of weight, often quite literally under a spotlight and with a megaphone in your hand.
In those moments, you are very aware that your opening line matters, your tone and branding matters, and your decisions matter. And when the stakes are high, pressure does not just test your communication. It can interfere with it, it can make you rush, over-explain, become defensive, or try too hard to sound in control.
You see exactly the same thing in business. A client pushes back on price and somebody starts over-justifying. A senior leader gets challenged in a meeting and becomes oddly defensive. A presenter feels the room go quiet and starts speaking twice as fast. A salesperson hears an objection and panics into discounting.
None of that usually happens because they lack ability. It happens because pressure has hijacked their judgement.
That is why bravery in business is rarely physical. It is reputational. It is the courage to say the difficult thing in the meeting. To hold your ground in a negotiation without becoming awkward or aggressive. To present an idea that might be rejected. To ask for the fee or price you believe is justified. To stay calm when other people are wobbling.
A lot of people in business are not really afraid of the work itself. They are afraid of what might happen to their image if it goes badly. They are afraid of looking foolish, being blamed, being rejected or getting it wrong in public. So, they talk too much, they make clumsy concessions, they latch onto scripts. They lose the ability to listen and try to protect their ego instead of protecting the outcome.
The goalkeeper conversation reminded me that some roles carry asymmetric judgement.
The margin for error feels smaller. The mistakes feel more public, and the consequences feel more personal. That is true for senior leaders. It is true for hostage negotiators. It is true for anyone handling difficult conversations, public presentations, or high-stakes client relationships.
If you are in one of those roles, there are two things worth remembering.
Feeling pressure does not mean you are unsuited to the role.
It often means that the role matters.
You do not get the upside of visible roles without accepting the downside of exposure.
You cannot have influence without scrutiny.
You cannot lead without being judged.
You cannot negotiate important things without risking discomfort.
So, what helps?
Prepare your opening. Do not confuse nerves with inability. Focus on process, not image. Accept that some roles are judged more harshly than others. And stay calm enough to think.
That former goalkeeper was right. Some roles do require a different kind of bravery. Not because the people in them are mad, but because they are repeatedly asked to perform with their judgement, their composure and their reputation on the line.
And whether you are standing in goal, talking somebody to put a knife down, or walking into a difficult commercial negotiation, the challenge is often the same: can you stay composed enough to do your job when everybody might remember your mistake? That is where bravery lives.
Nigel Taberner is a communications expert and former UK hostage negotiator who now brings those skills to the corporate world through conference speeches and communications masterclasses.
After my recent article about a painful encounter that I had with the 'I understand' man, I thought that I would introduce you to another acquaintance of mine, the man (or woman) for whom, "It's not a problem..." A couple of months ago I had to take my car for its annual MOT test. It is a yearly trauma because the car is my runaround for work, is pretty old and it has a massive amount of mileage on the clock. In short, its days are numbered. In order to get it through this really stringent test my tactic, as always, was to completely fool the mechanic by vaccuming it and putting it through a car wash... works every time! I bought my car wash token and drove the car in. Unfortunately all was not well with the car wash that morning. Instead of cleaning the car it made a strange grinding noise, dumped brown water all over my roof and squirted foam vertically into the air to quite an impressive height. I drove the car out of the wash, morphing by the second into Basil Fawlty. Barely had I got one foot out of the door when the man who had served me came running out of his booth, waving his arms and shouting, "It's not a problem". I have to be honest, that was not what I needed to hear. For me, it was a massive problem. Not only was I going to be late but how on earth was I supposed to convince the mechanic that my car was roadworthy now? My world was falling apart. However well meaning, the last thing that I wanted to be told, was that my problem was not a problem. It might not have been a problem for him, but it certainly was for me. He undoubtedly said it with the best of intentions but what he needed to do was deal with me, before he dealt with the issue. He may have had the solution (hence to him it genuinely wasn't a problem), but he needed to let me get things off my chest. He had to listen to me and help me to manage my emotional response so that he could then go on to resolve the issue. And it gets worse. This was a pretty spontaneous incident. It may have provoked that emotional 'knee-jerk' in me, that couldn't be ignored, but it hadn't had the time to brew properly... I am sure that you can think of a situation where you were really angry about something or someone and you were going to ring the Customer Service Team and give them a piece of your mind. Not only had you got a story to tell them, but you had rehearsed exactly how the conversation was going to go, in your head, over and over. You had actually made yourself notes so that you didn't forget to say something along the way... But, when you spoke to the agent, barely had you opened your mouth before you were interrupted with, 'It is not a problem', and presented with their solution that you were expected to accept, be happy with and move on... problem solved... But... you still had all of this stuff that you hadn't had a chance to say! You had a script that you were not even halfway through! You found yourself left with the sense that, how you felt was of no significance, it wasn't relevant, because they had the answer. And it left you feeling frustrated and angry... So todays takeaway is... Even if you have the solution, you have got to let people vent. You have got to let them get it off their chest. It is perfectly natural and it will help them immensely in dealing with what is happening. By not allowing them to do that, all you are doing is making your own life so much harder for yourself. So don't be so quick to jump in and 'head problems off at the pass'. It is infuriating to be on the receiving end of it. Whether it is a client, a customer, an employee, your manager, your teenager... be patient! My experience as a hostage negotiator was that you need to deal with person before you can begin to address the problem. Allow them to express their feelings, let them say what they need to say, hear them out and then, and only then, offer your solution... They are far more likely to accept it... Nigel Taberner is a former UK Hostage Negotiator who now brings those skills to the corporate world.
One of the phrases that you should never hear coming from the mouth of a hostage negotiator is, “I understand”. Former negotiator Nigel Taberner explains why that is. ‘I understand’ is one of our ‘go-to’ phrases in life when we are dealing with someone who has a complaint, who is having a hard time or is emotional about something. We genuinely say it because we think that it will make people feel better, but it can have completely the opposite effect. A few months ago I was having lunch with my family in the kitchen. We had put the washing machine on and it was doing a spin cycle. Suddenly there was an almighty bang! When we recovered from the shock, we discovered a massive hole had been blown out of the washing machine door window and that shards of glass had been thrown all over the kitchen, narrowly missing us. We were given the usual run-around on the phone for a couple of days before we managed to get it taken seriously but, in the meantime, I had to negotiate my way around my arch-nemeses. The ‘I Understand’ man… The ‘I Understand’ man ‘understood’ that we were unhappy with the product failing in spectacular fashion and exploding in the way that it had. He ‘understood’ that we felt like we were being given the run-around on the phone. He ‘understood’ that we were starting to get frustrated because we felt that nobody was taking it seriously. He even ‘understood’ how scary it must have been when the glass went bang and was thrown across the kitchen. Now, given my background, I really do try not to go through life critiquing the quirks of people’s communication styles and, in fairness, he probably was trying to make me feel better by demonstrating what he believed to be empathy. But I’d had more than enough of being ‘understood’ for one day. I said to him, “You have no idea how we felt because you were not stood there when the glass blew out. You were not there, and you did not experience it. You did not hear it and you did not see it. Even if you had been there, you would only understand how you felt, you would still have no idea what it felt like for me”. So, the first take home is that you can never ‘understand’ how I feel. You cannot walk in my shoes. You can put my shoes on, you can have a good walk around in them, but you will only ever understand how they feel for you. You will not understand how tight or uncomfortable they are for me. You will never experience them rubbing like I do. You will never know the sense of relief I feel when I take them off at the end of the day. We can both experience exactly the same thing but feel very differently. So, no matter how well intended it may be, to say ‘I understand’ does not cut it. It is fog language. Very often as we navigate our way through life, we become the ‘I Understand Man/ Woman’. When our colleague at work breaks up with a partner, we ‘understand’. When our kids are struggling with exam stress or bullying, we ‘understand’. When somebody misses out on a promotion, we ‘understand’. So, “what do I do?”, I hear you saying. What is the appropriate response? Well counter-intuitively the best response is to be honest and say, “I can’t possibly understand what that must have been like for you”. Then sit back, be quiet, listen, and let them tell you. It works. Saying to them, “I can’t even begin to imagine how you must have felt”, acknowledges that their feelings are only ever theirs but, when combined with good listening skills it gives them the opportunity to articulate exactly how they feel and what it is that they are going through. Then, and only then, will you ever ‘understand’… Nigel Taberner is a communications expert and former UK hostage negotiator who now brings those skills to the corporate world through conference speeches and communications masterclasses.