Old habits die hard but Swansea City’s players will soon grasp the fact that Garry Monk can no longer be called by his nickname. The former Swansea player, captain and interim head coach has drawn a line in the sand since he was given the manager’s job on a permanent basis in May. Any slip of the tongue from now on will result in a donation being made to the players’ fine committee.

“It’s funny because we were talking about this the other day – it’s exactly the same situation as Roberto Martínez had when he became manager here. He had been Rob to us for years as a player,” Monk says. “With me, at the end of last season it was ‘Monks’ still, because I wasn’t official manager – I was interim as they called it, and I didn’t have a problem with it. But I’m the manager now, so it’s ‘Boss’ or ‘Gaffer’. You’ll still get the occasions – and it was the same with Roberto – when someone forgets and says ‘Monks’. It’s not a respect thing, it’s something they’ve naturally called me for years. But as soon as the fines come in it’ll stop.”

The last comment is delivered with a smile. This is Monk’s first national newspaper interview since he was confirmed as Michael Laudrup’s successor and he is on good form. Generous with his time and candid with his thoughts, Monk – who will be the first manager Louis van Gaal takes on in a competitive game when Swansea play Manchester United on the opening weekend of the Premier League season this Saturday – shakes his head as he thinks back to that whirlwind first week in the job in February, when he went from being a squad player on the periphery to the man charged with securing the club’s Premier League survival. “I didn’t sleep for four days. Maybe I had an hour’s kip, nodded off and got back up. It was insane,” he says.

To cap it all, his first game was a south Wales derby against Cardiff. “The only time I wasn’t nervous was when the players came back in from the warm-up. I could see it in their eyes, I just knew we weren’t going to lose,” Monk says. “I wish you could bottle and inject that into them every game. But the rest of it was horrible because I was thinking: nobody has ever done the double, please don’t let this be the first time – they’ll never forgive you. Ten years of building up a great relationship could be ruined in an hour-and-a-half.’”

He had nothing to worry about. Swansea won 3-0 and the Liberty Stadium was bouncing. Not that there was much time to celebrate. Monk’s life had been “turned on its head” by the all-consuming nature of the job. Then, three weeks later, his fiancee gave birth to twins. “It’s all a bit of a blur,” he says, laughing. “So much was happening so quickly. I was there at the birth, I slept at the hospital that night and then came to work in the day.”

The transition from player to manager was never going to be easy but Monk has dealt with everything head on, from telling senior members of the squad face-to-face that they have no future at the club – he says one of the most important lessons that he learned from Brendan Rodgers, the former Swansea manager, is that honesty is the best policy – or letting his old team-mates know that he means business in his new role.

“As a player, when I trained I trained,” Monk says. “Don’t get me wrong; I would be one of the first to have a laugh. And I’m not going to change myself, I still have the odd bit of humour as a manager. But when we’re working, I’m not here to muck around. If you make that clear from day one, they understand that. They know exactly what I’m about. I’m not here to be anyone’s friend. I’m here to make sure we’re a team that can compete fiercely in this league.”

A self-confessed perfectionist, Monk has not left a stone unturned from the moment Huw Jenkins, the Swansea chairman, asked him to take over. He discusses transfer plans with Jenkins every day, appointed a full-time performance psychologist last month and is determined to create a culture where “the players’ excuses are minimal for everything”. It is not surprising that there has been little time for a break. “We had one week where I went away with the missus and the kids – even then I was on the phone, planning stuff.”

He is certainly not complaining. Monk had long thought about management, going back to the days when Martínez was playing alongside him in League Two, but he could never have imagined that the door would open so soon, in the Premier League and at the club where he enjoys such a special relationship with the fans after captaining Swansea in every division.

Some have questioned the wisdom of giving the job to a 35-year-old with so little experience in the dugout and predicted that Swansea will struggle after losing Michu, Ben Davies, Michel Vorm and Pablo Hernández (Lukasz Fabianski, Bafétimbi Gomis, Gylfi Sigurdsson and Jefferson Montero are the significant arrivals so far). For Monk, who fully expects a harsher ride this season, the negative comments are a great source of motivation.

Garry Monk, centre, in thoughtful mood on the Swansea City bench during the recent friendly against Villareal. Photograph: Ian Smith/Action Images Photograph: Ian Smith/Action Images

“There is no manager in this league who has got a better relationship with their fans than I have, so that is great. And I appreciate that because they’ve been so supportive to me. But that now counts for so much less because I’m going to be judged purely on results – and that’s what I mean by it being harsher now,” he says.

“A lot of people will be expecting me to fail, expecting me not to do well because of all the things that have been talked about – inexperience: ‘it was the honeymoon period he got through before, now it’s the real test.’ But I know that, so there’s going to be no surprises in terms of what will be said or written. I’ve had this my whole life. There is nothing better than when someone doubts you. I thrive off that – I love it. It was the same when we came through the leagues, people would say: ‘He’s not going to be able to play in the next league.’

“It’s different now because I’m manager of a Premier League club and there’s so much more media attention, but this is where everyone wants to be. I’m in a very lucky position where I’m in that world right away, when I thought it would take a lot longer, so I have to make the most of it. And to do that you have to have the attitude that you can prove people wrong.”

That process starts at Old Trafford on Saturday, almost 10 years to the day since Monk made his debut for the Welsh club in a 2-0 League Two defeat against Northampton at the Vetch Field. “That seems such a long time ago,” he says, smiling.

“I remember at the time we were training where they’ve built the Amazon warehouse now. It was a council pitch, had rabbit holes all over it – a shocking place. The council kicked us off but we had nowhere else to train so a hole was cut in the fence at the bottom and everyone crawled through to get on to the pitch. We had a metal container for the changing room.”

Sitting in his office at Swansea’s new training ground, Monk knows as well as anyone how far the club has come. At the same time, he wants to stay true to the principles that carried Swansea through the leagues and helped them to make such an impact in the top flight. When he took over from Laudrup last season, Monk talked about putting “a bit of the Swansea way back into things”, and those words, as well as the meaning behind them, have since taken on greater significance.

“You now see it on the wall at the top of the stairs at the training ground – ‘The Swansea City Way’ – and that’s my vision of what Swansea City should be as a group of players. The players see that every single day,” Monk says. “But I don’t just say it, I show them when I’m working. What you give to them football-wise is the most important part, but it’s the whole package: what it means to play for this club, the pride it should give you, the togetherness – fighting for the man next to you – and on top of all that bringing a style and a way of playing football.

“I’m already starting to put that into place. If I didn’t have a plan, I’d struggle. I’ve seen some managers go day-to-day not knowing what the vision is for a month’s or a week’s time. It doesn’t work. Players see through that. If they see you working towards something, they’re more likely to come with you if they believe in it. So that’s the thought process behind it. And if it takes me this season or 10 years to get it, that’s what I want.”