The team appears in a better place psychologically than it has for generations. Much of the credit has gone to Southgate, but also to Pippa Grange, the team psychologist, who has been working behind the scenes. “She’s an amazing person,” Alli said on Monday. “Everyone listens to her when she talks.”

Grange was appointed by the FA as its head of people and team development in November last year, given the job of building resilience while confronting the pressures and psychodramas faced by previous England squads.

She wrote in 2013 that being a woman in a male team environment “is a constant navigation, for everyone. I have no interest in being one of the lads and I don’t quite fit in the ‘nurturing mother figure’ category in terms of the leadership work I do. I would be professionally ineffective if I remained in the background, psychologically safe with minimal voice, and I am not here to be the centre of attention as some form of entertainment. I don’t want to be completely separate because that would make me inaccessible and probably be a lonely place to operate from.”

"The psychological transformation of the team has taken them much further than anyone could have expected at the start of the tournament, and raises the question of what the rest of us can learn from England’s awakening, and from sports psychology more generally. When it comes to life’s penalties and pressure points, Lane suggests thinking of the critical inner voice as “the yobbo in the crowd shouting at you. If you present it that way, [the player] will say: ‘Well, they don’t affect me.’ Sometimes [it helps to] see your own thoughts as a third person and, when they come in, choosing to see them as not relevant.”"

The sport performance consultant Andy Barton says: “Often, it’s the spin you put on things.” Emotions can be reframed – as with Alli saying that he was excited rather than nervous. Barton has worked with England players in the past, and they would “talk about the dread of taking a penalty, as if it’s the worst thing you could possibly do. We create this narrative in our heads and live it.” What he thinks the England team have done is to rethink the idea of a penalty from a threat to an opportunity. It helps, he points out, that the team is young and relatively “unsullied by past failures, so [Southgate has] been able to create a more positive narrative. They’re playing with freedom; there’s no fear of failure. Fear is essentially made up because it is a projection into the future, where you have created a narrative of something badly going wrong. We all do it, and we get very good at creating the negative [future] rather than the positive one.”

Simply thinking positive isn’t helpful, says Barton. “If the team just imagined themselves lifting the World Cup, that’s positive thinking but it doesn’t serve any real purpose.” Instead, he says, we should visualise what we need to do to perform, rather than the fantasy result. “The skill is in your application to a task because that’s the bit you’re in control of. Say you have a big presentation to do, or a big event, or job interview – if you’re feeling fear you’re already mentally rehearsing it in a negative way. [In mental rehearsal] you prime your brain to play it how you would like to be. You might want to be confident, speak clearly. It’s not just positive thinking.”

Routines can be useful, he says. “If you watch Harry Kane, if he’s been interrupted [before taking a penalty], he starts again – he picks the ball up and puts it down on the spot and goes through his whole routine again, and that’s something I’ve never seen England players do before. They usually want to get it over with as quickly as possible, but fear causes us to do things that are unhelpful.” Routines, says Barton, help to keep us in the moment, focused and in the right frame of mind.

When someone is under a moment of extreme pressure, using a tactic such as mental cues can be helpful, says Kate Hays, the head of psychology at the English Institute of Sport. “People will have cue words that will bring them back into focus on the task at hand – for some, they could be emotional cues; for others, it could be technically focused. It’s just one or two words that can get people to focus on the right thing.”

In dealing with a negative event, she says, “the reflection component is critical. It allows people time and space to work through that emotionally and be able to go back to what happened, to process it and be able to move on.” We could also learn to view failure as having potentially positive consequences in the long term. “There is some evidence that people have been able to be successful in sport because of previous [adverse] early experiences, not necessarily in sport,” says Hays. “Overcoming difficult situations and building resilience potentially contributes to success.”

Grange has no fear of failure either. She has written: “I’d like to turn this unhealthy preoccupation with success on its head and put it on the record that I think failure is really useful. For without failure we cannot progress longer, higher or faster. It’s a funny paradox – our successes are achieved through trying, and trying most often ends in failure. Every day in our general lives and our sporting lives we will win some and lose some; it’s just part of the way life should be. It could be missing out on a promotion, being pipped at the line in a running race or bombing out in an exam – it doesn’t matter – the important lesson is to learn from our failures, reassess, rethink, move forward (sometimes in a different direction) and keep those dreams and goals alive.”

Those in a managerial role – or teaching, perhaps, or parenting – may find praise can be more motivational than a telling-off, or allowing someone to dwell on mistakes. Raheem Sterling may have missed a couple of chances in the game against Sweden, but Caulfield says Southgate won’t be focusing on that. “[Sterling is] playing so well and creating mayhem for the opposition defences, so Gareth will be praising that. He won’t be criticising him for missing a chance, he’ll be doing the exact opposite – he’ll be praising him for contributing so much to the team.”

The era of hard-talking, tyrannical managers is over – both on and off the pitch. “Football, which I love and work in, is really bad at talking,” says Caulfield. “It does instructing and telling off but it doesn’t do talking and listening and empathy that well. It sounds a bit fluffy but that’s the world in which we now live, and the world in which these players have grown up.” Southgate, he says, realised early in his coaching career that instilling fear wasn’t going to work. “We all need a telling-off now and then – and he’s good at that, by the way – but you’ll get far more from putting your faith in people than you will anything else. People had this lazy opinion that he’s too ‘nice’ and they see kindness as weakness, but it’s the most unbelievable strength if you use it in the right way.”

As for nerves, it is a mistake to think it is essential or even desirable to eliminate them – from sport or from life. Caulfield says they can be “wonderful. They keep you alive and make you realise something important is about to happen. If you discuss what the nerves mean to you and how you deal with them, then they don’t become a threat to you. They become this wonderful cortisol that runs through your veins and you deal with the problem, and then you rest afterwards.” 

The above is an extract from the full article which can be found here https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jul/10/psychology-england-football-team-change-your-life-pippa-grange