Taking Emotional Control: Lessons from Ex-Footballer and Anxiety Coach Matt Young

Host: David Charlton, Sports Psychologist and Mental Toughness Practitioner

Guest: Matt Young, Anxiety and Fear Coach

Introduction

David: Hi Matt, it’s great to meet you today. Would you be able to share a little bit about your background and your interests with the listeners and viewers?

Matt: Absolutely, David. Thank you very much for having me on. My name is Matt Young, and I’m an anxiety and fear coach. I’ve been doing this for about six or seven years since my professional football career came to an end. Essentially, what I do is help people free themselves from the anxieties, fears, phobias, and OCDs that might be holding them back—whether in sports, business, or personal life.

Throughout my career, I’ve deep dived into why people get stuck and what keeps them returning to therapy year after year. I’ve developed a methodology that enables people to become very free from these limiting emotions within a matter of days and weeks.

Prior to this, I was a professional footballer for eight years, playing at various clubs. My own personal journey dealing with certain traits that affected my personal and professional life led me into this work and inspired me to get the qualifications and certifications needed. Now, I’ve helped thousands of people from all over the world.

The Power of Emotional Control

David: Let’s dig into your tagline: “Take Control of Your Mind.” Can you share what that’s all about and what message you’re trying to convey?

Matt: Right, so the messaging I put across is that I believe in emotional control. What I mean by that is people are always grappling for some form of control in their life—they’re trying to control their health, their finances, their relationships, their performance in sport, all these things.

Now, what this does is lead us to becoming very overwhelmed, overstimulated, anxious, fearful, and worried. When we feel in control, we feel good. But the moment an unexpected bill arrives, an unexpected health situation occurs, or our performance drops in sport, we’re out of control.

What I’m about is taking emotional control. We have two parts of our mind: the thinking mind and the emotional mind. Taking control of that as a whole allows you to create a freedom within yourself. No matter what happens out there, you have control, balance, safety, and certainty within yourself that allows you to be free.

This has been key because in my own personal situation, I was struggling with many different areas of my life. All I ever tried to do was control things—control people’s thoughts of me, control judgment, control whether I would fail. That was just a reflection of how out of control I actually was within myself.

From Football to Coaching: A Personal Journey

David: Did you experience feelings of helplessness and feeling out of control after your football career ended?

Matt: Truthfully, the end of my playing career wasn’t as bad as when I was in it. Like most kids, my dream was to be a professional footballer. At 18, when I was awarded a professional contract at Southampton, that was the epitome of that dream. But all it did was shine a spotlight on some of my deeper fears, deeper insecurities, and feelings of being out of control.

You hear a lot from players these days about when they step on the pitch—it’s a place to escape and be free. For me, it was a place to go even further under the microscope. The feelings of helplessness and worries used to come a lot when I tried to mask over those feelings through my professional career. I presented a confident Matt Young who was in control, a professional footballer, trying to mask what was going on underneath.

But that was the bit I found the toughest because, many years later, when my professional career ended, I dealt with some of the deeper demons and ailments of what was going on within my emotions. Football then became a closed chapter for me. I no longer used it as that mask I had for many years.

To answer your question pragmatically and directly: during my career was more of a struggle than ending it.

Control in a Chaotic Environment

David: In a football environment, being a team sport, there are so many factors outside your control—selection, teammates, coaches, scouts watching you, opponents. It’s quite chaotic. Did that feed a level of anxiety for you?

Matt: Absolutely, you’re spot on. As I touched on, I tried to control everything out there. You talk about players these days having superstitions. What’s a superstition? It’s a feeling or a ritual that I’m going to put in place that’s going to give me a feeling inside like I’m more in control.

I was no different. Everything from my right shin pad to my right boot to my right sock—I had to have these things in a certain way. When I’d step onto a pitch, I wouldn’t touch the initial white line. When I did, I’d have to do three knee jumps. I’d have to prepare, and all of this was before the whistle was blown.

All of these things were a grapple with the fact that I was about to step into an environment where I was going to be so out of control. You’re right—not being selected, something that could happen that I didn’t know at the time but filled me with so much internal fear. My whole grapple was to find some form of control within myself to get through it. For me, it was never about trying to excel and really own the moment. It was about not making a mistake. That just put the microscope on me and kept me emotionally off balance.

David: And having to move clubs regularly adds another layer, doesn’t it? Thinking about what the next five or ten years will look like, trying to predict the future—that can feel quite frightening and overwhelming.

Matt: Absolutely. The reality is, if you’re not in the top two divisions—the Premier League or the Championship—you’re on a year-to-year contract. By Christmas, decisions are being made about you for the next year. That fuels uncertainty, fear, and indecisiveness.

When you’re already coming from a place of a void, you’re almost in a minefield trying to tiptoe your way through, trying to get to the next season without imploding. At times, that’s exactly how it felt. But you have to project this mask, this aura, this sense of being in control and confident with no weakness.

Emotional Solutions Over Reactive Fixes

David: You mentioned having a line in professional sport about “emotional solutions to player performance.” Can you expand on that?

Matt: Everything I do now is essentially working on everything the player doesn’t do on the pitch. We have a line in professional sport that says “emotional solutions to player performance” because we believe in giving emotional solutions off the pitch to free someone up on it.

This has worked across many different sports and in everyday life. It speaks directly to the constant volatility of football and professional sport that feeds into that feeling of being out of control.

David: Do you think people who grew up in chaotic environments are better equipped to deal with chaotic environments?

Matt: I wouldn’t say they’re better equipped. I would say that most people don’t have the emotional grounding or foundations to be fully free and expressive in chaotic environments. When people come from chaotic environments, it’s often more of the same—they just roll with it.

But on the flip side, there’s been so much emotional volatility in a chaotic life that where do they ever find stableness? Where do they ever find control within themselves? That’s where you see stories of people going down the route of drinking, drugs, and other substances. Often, the reason is because there’s such an internal feeling of being out of control that they do anything they can to alter where they are and get out of their head.

The Mask and Identity

David: When you talk about masking and suppressing emotions, you can do that for a period. Some people do it for an entire career. But if you’re suppressing emotion for a long time, it’s going to bite you somewhere along the line, isn’t it?

Matt: Exactly. I work with a lot of players now who are coming out of their professional careers, as well as people in business and professional sports. What happens is this: people have presented a mask for so long that it’s become their core identity of who they are.

When they leave football, when they leave business, when they leave that environment, there’s a shell of a person left behind who doesn’t really have control or knowing of who they are and what they’re about away from that place. It’s a double-edged sword.

People use football as a way of masking, but also they get so embedded in masking that they end up believing that’s all they are and who they are. So when they step out of football, people ask, “Who am I? What’s next? Football was my life.”

But football is a vehicle that you used for many years. When we provide the emotional solutions to who Matt Young is—separate from football—you can drive a different vehicle and get the same things you got from football. You can keep life purposeful, fulfilling, and exciting. But that’s where a lot of people get stuck.

David: So part of your role is educating people and helping them with emotional mastery, helping them get to know themselves better—their identity, their roles, their purpose—which in turn hands over control to them?

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I think if I’m being completely frank, it’s like anything. We all know we should eat healthier, but we do it when we feel like we’ve put on a couple of pounds. We all know we should go to the gym more, but we actually do when we’re two weeks out from our holiday.

Most people will come to me when they feel like they’re really stuck in a situation—anxiety, fear, worry, stress, overwhelm, OCD. That’s when they’ll come. But the avenue I’m looking to progress toward is: why wait till the car breaks down to fix it? There’s a reason we have an MOT every year—to make sure everything stays moving forward the way it needs to.

That’s where education and proactiveness come in. I have this conversation with football clubs all the time. They say, “We technically prepare, tactically prepare, physically prepare. But how are your players emotionally preparing? How are they getting emotionally prepped and ready for a season with all its ups and downs? How are they prepared for being dropped, injured, or losing their place?”

They say, “We have psychologists for that.” I’m like, “Great, so it’s reactive then? Wait until the car breaks down to deal with it?” It’s often a conversation I’m having with clubs. I’ve worked with a few now. I’m never here to dismiss or negate what people are doing, but it seems like one of the only areas in life where we wait until things get really bad before we actually do something about it.

Urgency and Top Performers

David: Why do you think that is the case?

Matt: Honestly, it’s like anything. Urgency creates immediacy within people. We were all at school once—when does everyone do their homework? The night before it was due. When something’s urgent, we do it there and then. It’s immediate for us.

For most people, it isn’t until they’ve had a bad run of games, until they’re really struggling with anxiety in a certain area, until in work they don’t feel like they can perform in a certain way—that’s when they do something about it. We’re all busy with so many other moving parts requiring our urgency: kids, family, partners, parents, social obligations. Unless something is really deemed urgent in our life, we’re very good as human beings at saying, “That can wait, I’ve got time for that.” But then when it hits, that’s when we really get the job done.

David: I’m thinking about real top performers. It’s amazing how many at the very top are a little bit different. They’re obviously wired differently and don’t wait till the problem arises. They’re very proactive, always looking for that extra edge, seeking support, taking risks. Whereas the vast majority of people get comfortable very easily.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think there’s an issue with comfort because I think comfort and risk can actually go hand in hand. You can be comfortable within yourself and roll the dice out there.

But when it comes to what you’re saying, there are two times in a relationship when people put a lot of effort in: at the very start and when it’s about to end. That in-between stage is where people don’t apply the same things that brought them success. They become comfortable in that.

But like anything, when you first start a new job, you put a lot of effort, time, and focus in. When you join a new football club, you put a lot of focus, performance, and precision. After a while, people get comfortable.

When you see the Ronaldos, LeBron James, Serena Williams, Michael Phelps—the greats of our time—what makes them so great is there’s an urgency that says, “Right, you know what, let’s go again and again and again.” They’re comfortable within themselves, but they’re comfortable going, “The risk is in me not doing this.”

Most people wait until the risk happens to them to have to step into it. The greats understand it in a different way. They go, “No, the risk is if I miss out on this, if I don’t do this now.” That drive gives them an edge.

The Science of Success

David: I’m thinking about how there aren’t many individuals or teams who can go on a run where they win a league or a big tournament and then win another and another. It often seems people do it once and that’s all they do.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. When you see Man City winning four times back to back, Coach Juan said to me, “Success leaves clues.” If you look at Guardiola in those four seasons, his urgency, his intensity—you wouldn’t know if that was his first season or his 35th season. He brings that side of him that demands it now.

If you listen to some of his interviews from last season when City dropped off pace, he said, “It’s very, very tough. You can see that they haven’t got the same urgency. They haven’t got the same intensity.” That nature that brought them so much success dropped off.

You’re absolutely right. And this isn’t about being helter skelter all the time—you can’t rest, you can’t do anything, you have to be on it constantly. Absolutely not. But true top performers understand how to use the system. What I mean by use the system is the frameworks that produce success.

Success is a science at the end of the day. If you look at what successful people do—you can look at them in any industry—and you take those parts, you can apply it to any area of your life and create those results. One of those key parts is this: most people wait until things get so bad to deal with them. Instead, top performers put that in from the start. You have more success.