Tackle Your Feelings has formed a partnership with the Australian Psychological Society (APS) to up skill community Aussie Rules coaches in mental health education.

Coaches have told me that they wear many hats – first-aider, guider, director, trainer, mentor (the list goes on), and therapist. The therapist hat, however, doesn’t have to be one of them, but a therapeutic hat may be a much better fit. So, what’s the difference between being a therapist and being therapeutic? This blog is going to tease out the difference.

A chilly Melbourne night in Brighton was my first chance to look at the Tackle Your Feelings program. The session was held at the small but beautiful Baptist church of Brighton, and the room quickly filled as the Brighton dads & coaches walked in after work.

As heads hang after the sirens, players are likely to feel a range of emotions. As a coach, how do you make sense of the players’ experiences and what can you do to help them?

Mindfulness is all the rage lately. Coaches, athletes, trainers, and psychologists talk about the use of mindfulness in footy. But what is mindfulness? What is its connection with footy? This blog will take a dive into mindfulness and its connection with sport performance.

Tackle Your Feelings visited Alice Springs to present the program to community football coaches from the local area.

More than 30 community coaches from the Townsville region had the opportunity to hear firsthand from Gold Coast Suns coach Stuart Dew about the value he places on building the skills to understand, recognise and manage mental health issues in his players. Dew invited these volunteers into the Suns inner sanctum for a special briefing...

Just like aspects of our game, from time-to-time, our sleep needs a bit of work. And just as we need to review and practice our skills in footy to play well, it’s worth doing the same with our sleep to look after our mental health. So, here are three things we can consider to get...

We can spend (on average), up to one third of our life asleep. This is probably just a little more than we spend coaching or playing footy! Perhaps you’ve heard that sleep is important for physical recovery after a game or training, as well as for mental readiness before a game, but is sleep important to mental health as well? If it is, how important is it?

I’m sure, like me, you’ve had many challenging conversations in your lifetime. Some that have gone well and others that have gone as badly as kicking a behind… from the top of the goal square. As a coach, your job is to help develop players to become the best they can be. The process of...