The Scholar-Practitioner
Where Research Meets the Field
Translating doctoral research into practice - building the human capacity to understand your own experience and navigate what the world asks of you. In sport. In leadership. In life.
-
Milan Trajlov
-
PhD Candidate: Business Psychology
FIFA Pro License: ATFA (Argentinian Football Association)
USSF A License: United States Soccer Federation
THE STORY
Living Between Worlds
For nearly 20 years I coached in youth settings - working with players at the formative stages of their development.
Early in that journey I noticed something that would shape everything that followed. Tactics alone were not enough. The cognitive side of the athlete - how they perceived, processed, and made meaning of their experience - was just as critical to development as anything that happened on the pitch. Maybe more so.
That realization turned inward.
If the athlete's inner experience mattered that much, so did the coach's. I began examining my own cognitive processes, my own assumptions, my own way of making sense of what coaching demanded. The journey toward understanding the athlete became a journey toward understanding myself.
And somewhere in that process I found what coaching eventually teaches you if you stay curious long enough: understanding others begins with understanding yourself. The more precisely you can name your own experience, the more clearly you can read someone else's.
That inward turn led me to graduate study, and eventually to doctoral research. "Living Between Worlds" -- a phenomenological investigation into how professional soccer coaches experience the structural paradoxes of their role - is where that journey arrived.
What I found: not all struggles coaches face are personal failures. Some are structural features of the landscape itself. The same applies to athletes and organizations. Knowing the difference changes everything.
But the deeper finding was this: the capacity to understand your own experience - to name what you are living through with precision, and navigate what comes next with clarity - is not a performance skill. It is a human skill. Sport, coaching, and organizational life are the contexts in which we develop it. The development itself is the point.
An athlete who learns to understand their own experience does not just perform better. They become someone who can navigate whatever comes next - in competition, in relationships, in the decisions that matter most. The same is true for coaches and organizations.
Adaptiverse is built on that conviction. We use the arena of sport and professional life to develop people - not just performers.
Adaptiverse is the translation of that research into practice.
What Guides the Work
-
We start with how you experience reality - before we introduce what others observed.
-
You cannot navigate what you have not named. The work always begins here.
-
We actively analyze how you express your experience - and where that expression falls short of your actual realization. The ability to articulate what you are living through with depth and precision is a professional skill. Building it is part of the work.
-
Neither tells the whole truth alone.
-
Some things cannot be solved - only navigated. The goal is not resolution. It is capacity.
-
Understanding others begins with understanding yourself. The more precisely you can name your own experience, the more clearly you can read someone else's. This is true for coaches, athletes, and organizations alike.