Carlo Ancelotti: What Calm Leadership Teaches Us About Mindset and Self-Awareness
Carlo Ancelotti is renowned for staying calm under pressure. His approach offers powerful lessons about self-awareness, mindset and adapting your leadership style to get the best from others.
Carlo Ancelotti: What Calm Leadership Teaches Us About Mindset and Self-Awareness
“Do you think they listen more if you shout?”
It’s a question Carlo Ancelotti has asked when talking about his approach to coaching.
His answer is wonderfully simple.
“No. The more you shout, the less they listen.”
There is something fascinating about that coming from one of football’s most successful managers.
Football is hardly an environment lacking emotion. Pressure. Expectation. Frustration. Adrenaline. Every decision analysed.
Yet Ancelotti has become renowned for something quite different.
Calmness.
There is a reason the affectionate “Don Carlo” persona has become so closely associated with him. The raised eyebrow, the composure on the touchline and the apparent refusal to get swept up in the chaos have become part of his public image.
But underneath the persona is a much more interesting leadership question.
How does a leader remain in control of their own behaviour when everything around them is encouraging a reaction?
And then comes the line that, for me, gets to the heart of his approach:
Whether the game goes well or whether it goes badly, I am in control of myself.
That isn’t really a lesson about football.
It’s a lesson about self-awareness, mindset and leadership.
The Gap Between Stimulus and Response
There is a quote I regularly come back to:
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.
The exact origin of the quote is uncertain. It is often attributed to Viktor Frankl, although there is no clear evidence that he wrote those precise words.
Regardless of its origin, the idea behind it is incredibly powerful.
Something happens. Then we respond. But those two things don’t have to be instantaneous.
There can be a gap between them. And within that gap sits choice.
A referee makes a decision Ancelotti disagrees with. A player makes a mistake. His team concedes. Those situations can create frustration or anger.
Ancelotti isn’t suggesting that effective leaders somehow stop experiencing emotion. He’s talking about what happens after the emotion appears.
Do I react? Or do I choose how I want to respond?
That distinction matters enormously in leadership.
Self-Awareness Gives You More Choice
Self-awareness can sometimes sound passive. Know your strengths. Understand your weaknesses. Recognise your preferences. But that’s only the beginning.
The real value of self-awareness in leadership is that it gives us more choice over what happens next.
If I understand myself, I’m more likely to notice:
“I’m getting frustrated.”
“I’m becoming impatient.”
“I’m taking over.”
“I’ve stopped listening.”
“I’m disappearing into the detail.”
Without awareness, our response can become automatic.
Stimulus → reaction.
With greater awareness, something else becomes possible.
Stimulus → awareness → choice → response.
We won’t always get that right. But we have a better chance of recognising what is happening within us before everybody else experiences the consequences.
That’s why self-awareness matters. It helps us notice our reactions, understand our impact and make a more deliberate choice about what we do next.
What Happens to Your Style on a Bad Day?
This is something I particularly like exploring through Insights Discovery.
Everyone has all four colour energies, but our individual combination of preferences differs. Understanding those preferences when everything is going well is only part of the picture.
What happens when we’re under pressure?
In workshops, I sometimes describe this as what our colour energies can look like on a “bad day”.
We’re not suddenly becoming a different person. The same strengths and behavioural preferences can simply start showing up differently.
Determination can become impatience. Enthusiasm can become distracting. Consideration can become reluctance to challenge. Attention to detail can become over-analysis.
And that’s where perception becomes particularly important.
I might think, “I was being decisive.” Someone else experiences me as dismissive. I think I’m showing passion. Somebody else experiences anger. I think I’m ensuring quality. My team experiences micromanagement.
Knowing what I intended isn’t enough. I also need to understand how my behaviour may have been experienced by somebody else.
That is one reason Insights Discovery profile debriefs can be so valuable. They create an opportunity to explore preferences, strengths, possible blind spots and how our style may be perceived.
That awareness gives us something incredibly valuable: the opportunity to adapt.
Shouting Isn’t the Same as Communicating
This brings us back to Ancelotti.
“The more you shout, the less they listen.”
It’s easy to interpret that purely as a comment about volume. I think there’s a much more interesting leadership lesson underneath it.
Communication isn’t measured by how strongly I deliver my message. It’s influenced by what the other person is actually able to receive.
I can repeat myself, become more forceful and increase the volume. But if the other person has stopped listening, none of that improves the communication. My emotional state may become more powerful than the message itself.
The Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory explores how emotional expressions can influence the thoughts, feelings and behaviour of those observing them. Research involving football teams has examined this too, including a study of 30 Dutch teams and 376 players that found associations between coaches’ emotions and aspects of performance.
That doesn’t mean leaders should pretend to be permanently happy. Nor does it mean anger can never have a useful role.
The more useful point is this:
Your emotional state can become part of somebody else’s environment.
A senior leader walks into a meeting visibly angry. People notice. Someone becomes more cautious. Someone decides not to challenge. The leader may not have chosen those consequences, but their behaviour has still influenced the room.
That’s why managing ourselves is part of leading others.
Mindset and Adaptability
There is a danger of turning Ancelotti’s example into: good leaders stay calm, bad leaders shout.
Leadership isn’t that simple.
Being calm isn’t automatically effective, and being forceful isn’t automatically ineffective. Different situations require different things. The interesting part of Ancelotti’s comments is his distinction between passion and losing control. You can care deeply, challenge someone and create urgency without surrendering control over how you behave.
That’s a mindset.
If I believe “They’ll only take this seriously if I get angry”, that belief influences my behaviour. If I believe “I’m the leader, so they need to adapt to me”, that influences my behaviour too.
But imagine replacing those assumptions with different questions.
What does this person need from me right now?
How is my behaviour affecting their ability to hear what I’m saying?
Is my current response helping me achieve what I actually want?
Suddenly we have options.
Authenticity doesn’t mean behaving the same way with everybody. “This is just how I am” can easily become an excuse not to adapt.
One person may appreciate a direct conversation. Someone else needs more context. One person wants space to think before answering. Another thinks by talking.
The question isn’t simply “What’s my leadership style?”
It’s “What does this person need from me to perform at their best?”
Ancelotti’s career provides an interesting example of this beyond emotional control. Earlier in his managerial career, he has spoken about being much more rigid tactically. At Parma, he rejected the opportunity to sign Roberto Baggio because Baggio didn’t fit the 4-4-2 system he wanted to play.
He later described that decision as a mistake.
His thinking changed. Rather than forcing players into a predetermined system, he increasingly adapted the system around the qualities of the players available to him.
That’s a powerful leadership metaphor.
Instead of asking “How do I get this person to work my way?”, ask “How do I adapt my approach so this person can give their best?”
That’s not lowering expectations. It’s recognising that effective leadership is relational.
It’s also where Insights Discovery becomes more useful than simply identifying preferences. Sometimes we bring colour energies instinctively. At other times we deliberately bring different colour energies because we’ve recognised what the person or situation requires. That’s adaptability.
Leading Others Starts With Leading Yourself
It’s relatively easy to talk about leadership style when everything is going well. The interesting bit happens when it isn’t. A customer complains. A project misses its deadline. Someone challenges your decision.
What happens to your behaviour then? Do you become louder? Quieter? More controlling? More critical?
And perhaps the most important question: what happens to the people around you when you do?
Pressure can reduce the gap between stimulus and response. Self-awareness helps us put the gap back.
That’s why this statement from Ancelotti stands out:
Whether the game goes well or whether it goes badly, I am in control of myself.
We can’t control every outcome or every person. But we can become more aware of what’s happening within ourselves, challenge the mindset shaping our response and make more deliberate choices about what the person in front of us needs.
Perhaps that’s the real lesson from Don Carlo.
Effective leadership isn’t about discovering your one perfect leadership style.
It’s about understanding yourself well enough to realise that your first response doesn’t always have to be your final response.
Then using that small gap between stimulus and response to ask:
What does this person need from me right now?
That’s where self-awareness becomes leadership.
And where leading yourself becomes the starting point for leading others.
Explore Your Own Leadership Style
If you’re curious about how your preferences influence the way you communicate, respond under pressure and lead other people, an Insights Discovery Personal Profile can help you understand your individual combination of colour energies and how other people may experience your style.
Find out more about Insights Discovery profiles and one-to-one debriefs →
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