If you listen to the praise, you can't ignore the criticism and, while I didn't like or appreciate it at the time, I now realise that it was my own actions that allowed both to affect me rather than the words said or written.

My enlightening experience came when I worked in Greece for a year. Observing the media at work there and the way they equally worshipped or vilified coaches, sometimes within the same week, made me appreciate that in Australia we enjoy a far more lenient environment. Of course, it was not easy to adjust to and for a while I made the mistake of not accepting I was in a different culture.

The city I was in had four daily papers, three local TV stations and three local radio stations, and they all reported daily on the team I was in charge of. Everything was reported on, from how we trained to who trained well, what drills we were doing and with which players and even to the point where it was reported where I had dinner the night before. I realised that privacy and team confidentiality were no longer possible and the best I could hope for were that the stories were at least fact - but even that was by no means certain.

If I applied local standards to that reporting, then I would be suing for defamation and privacy invasion every day, not to mention the psychological damage it would have done to my state of mind. Instead I dealt with it like the locals did and came to appreciate that most of it was born from passion rather than vindictiveness and ultimately the general public were still able to form their opinion on the work I was doing based on the team's performance rather than on how it was reported. In a nutshell, I became less precious.

My educational experience was when I came back to Australia and was lucky enough to be offered a job at Fox Sports. I realised that working in the media had its own responsibilities and pressures and that an opinion was the one essential that you were required to offer every time you spoke.