New faces, maybe perking up the squad and giving you another arrow to your bow - that can be a help.
I speak five languages: English, Swedish, French, Italian, and German.
In football, however well you think you are doing, however well your life is going, there is always a mugger there lurking in the shadows to bash you over the head when you least expect it.
The main problem with English players has always been the price.
It's true that if it's always going to be that if you win the World Cup or European Championship, you're a success, and if you don't, you're a failure, then you're bedding yourself for a lack of success because there aren't many coaches who have won those things, and there are thousands who haven't.
The Premier League is what it is. Some people will see the intensity and quality as a great advantage for your players: it will make them better. Some will see it as a disadvantage because the players play at such a high level and such intensity, it's difficult for them to drum that up, that intensity, with a very short space of rest time.
Everywhere I've managed, I've left a platform for my successor to build on, and this is a great satisfaction for me, even if I don't necessarily get the recognition for it.
To be frank, you can't compare the atmosphere and the way people behaved in the Olympic Stadium with the game I watched the day after, the Community Shield.
I think any manager who tells you, 'I am very good at keeping my equilibrium. I'm always calm and reasoned, and results don't affect me particularly. I can take the good with the bad, and I can put the wins and the losses in perspective,' you will find a special person. I've never met one.
I enjoyed Wembley like all the managers before me, and I would hope that games would still be played there by the England national team.
The day it becomes impossible for teams like Palace to get results against City, the league might as well just fold up, and we'll do everything on paper.
The reality of football rests on that patch of green between 90 and 95 minutes. Whichever team is going to win has to do it on the field of play and by scoring more goals than the opposition.
I assisted Bobby Houghton at Halmstads, and we were both just under 30. We'd say, 'Wouldn't it be great to do this for maybe 10 years, save a little money, then perhaps start a little business together.' Some sort of travel agency. We had no football thoughts beyond that, other than maybe combining it with a bit of sport, getting a few tours going.
There is so much interaction in a football match: between you and your team-mates and how you support each other, work for each other, make runs. But I also enjoy the other aspect: the pressing and how people work so hard to recover the ball.
I can get by quite well in Italian or German, though if the discussion got to a high level, I'd run out of vocabulary. I'm stronger in French and Swedish.
We believe defending is very much a team job, and we can't just rely on a back four and a goalkeeper.
Fans jump on your bandwagon and desert you when you hit the harder times.
I don't think there are many people out there - except, perhaps, the odd Twitter troll who knows no better - who believes that racially abusing people or threatening people is the right way to go.
I don't think there are many jobs that would have tempted me away from Fulham, to be perfectly honest.
I'm always disappointed when we lose, and it's happened quite a few times.
