No one has thought harder about how to make dinghies go fast than Paul Brotherton. Not only has he enjoyed a good deal of personal success - going to the Olympics in 1992 and top three results 470 and 49er World Championships, for example - but he is reckoned to be one of the best coaches in the business.

Now Paul, by his own admission, was a bit of a hothead in his youth. A bit like potassium, all you had to do was add water and he would explode. I should know, because I was on the receiving end a few times during our brief sailing career together!

But there were a number of times later in his career when he had a bad regatta, and everyone said, ‘Here we go, who's he going to turn up with at the next event?' But lo and behold, he'd be with the same crew and come out guns blazing. Over time, Paul seems to have worked out what makes him tick, and learned ways of getting the best out of himself, as well as keeping the demons at bay. Not only that, but he has worked out how to pass on that hard-earned knowledge.

At the Olympic level, Paul is now one of the most sought-after personal coaches. He has had great success with the Austrian 470 sailors for example, boosting the top men from 24th in the ISAF rankings up to 10th, while the women have climbed from 9th to 3rd in the world. Sailors seem to respond well to his training methods and the success in competition follows soon after.

The odd few times I've spent around Paul in recent years, you feel like you're soaking up so much information and new ways of approaching your sport. But like most of us, for whom sailing is our weekend hobby rather than our paid profession, I wouldn't be able to afford Paul's coaching fees. Paul's answer to this comes in the form of a new website which he launched at the Dinghy Sailing Show in Alexandra Palace. Mysailingcoach.com is an interactive website that takes you through a questionnaire so that Paul can find out about your abilities and aspirations, and then comes up with a structured programme to help you achieve your goals.

Put together by Dave McNamara (a talented web designer who also happens to be one of Paul's former crews!), it is a beautifully laid out and very thought-provoking website. Even going through the questionnaire process is an eye-opener. Having done the Olympic campaigning thing some years ago, I've long been aware of the importance of goal-setting but it's been a while since I've sat down and actually laid down some hard and fast goals for the season. A recent visit to an Olympic Development Squad camp at Weymouth reminded me just how goal-focused the top sailors are, and anyone who signs up to Mysailingcoach.com will gain access to this structured way of thinking.

Subscribers to the site, which costs £20 a month, will also be able to tap Paul's brains on a regular basis so, far from being a one-size-fits-all product, Paul claims it is possible to tailor a training programme closely to the individual. One thing that Paul believes all sailors can benefit from, however, is learning how to become what he calls ‘emotionally neutral'. In other words, how not to be a hothead.

Paul says: "You get sailors making emotional decisions and I think that is the biggest mistake you can make. Opportunities in races tend to come along in 20-second periods. If you see the opportunity at the start of that 20-second period, you'll take a gain - or you won't make a loss. If you see that opportunity with 10 seconds of it gone, then you'll probably make less than half of the potential gain. At the end of the 20-second period, everyone has probably seen that potential gain, so the opportunity has gone.

"Let's take the windward mark as an example, and a windshift has made the top reach much broader, everyone is going to end up going high. Everyone will do their usual thing of staying high to keep their air clear and they'll end up sailing a third extra distance. But if you're awake and you're aware of this and say you're at the back of the pack, you could have 20 seconds of sailing straight towards the mark while everyone else is going high. That could be a gain of 10 boats.

"Similarly, if you're sitting on the start line and you realise with 30 seconds to go that the wind has suddenly gone left, then if you sheet on and go while everyone else is holding station, that's a big gain in your favour. Everyone else at 10 seconds to go, says: ‘Oh damn, we need to sheet on!'. For them, the moment has gone, you've already got a 10-second or more jump on them."

These are interesting examples, but what does this have to do with being ‘emotionally neutral', you might ask? Well, for Paul, the answer is simple: "You need to be emotionally neutral in order to be mentally fluid and agile to see those opportunities. So my coaching philosophy is always, whenever we're doing execution of an exercise, it's just that. There's no debrief or analysis of it, you just do it - because that's what you need to do in a race.

"What many of us are guilty of - skippers in particular - is going around the windward mark and discussing what we did during the hoist while we're going down the reach, when we should be focused on the here and now. I know this because I've been as guilty of this as anyone. It's that kind of distraction that causes problems for many of us, and something we need to work on overcoming."

Paul's impressive list of championship results suggests he has got pretty good at focusing on the here and now, on remaining ‘emotionally neutral', but he admits: "I don't think I've ever mastered it. There are times when I've done it very well, but there are many times when I've been distracted by my current position in a race. So I still have the ability [to get angry], I don't think that leaves you, but emotional maturity is something that's available to all of us, and when you realise that it's a choice rather than a trick - then it becomes much easier to attain it."

The difficult part comes in changing old habits. "We're all habitual. If you lose your rag once, you're 50 per cent more likely to lose your rag next time. But if you let the frustration wash over you, and you can remain emotionally neutral, you can genuinely get rid of the frustration. One of the best things you can do is accept that the sport is all about dealing with change, and coping with mistakes." According to Paul, your success in sailing is largely determined by how well you cope with the setbacks. "Don't fight the sport, that's what I say to my sailors. If you can stay emotionally neutral then you're in a better position to cope with your mistakes and take advantage when other sailors make silly mistakes. The really stupid mistake is not to take advantage of other people's mistakes because you're still beating yourself up about your own errors."

Paul had to learn the discipline of reacting to situations in a different way, in order to improve his own sailing. Now that he has learned those techniques, he is a passionate advocate of those techniques. "I'm pretty good at explaining this stuff, because I fall into those pitfalls myself. So that has made me pretty good at telling young sailors how they're going to react to certain situations. ‘This will happen, your mind will want to do this,' so you give them x,y,z to focus on instead. It's a matter of pointing out to people that the way they think and react is a choice, it's not something that ‘happens' to them. I'm really stern in training when I see people let their frustration show, even if they don't say anything but I see their body language change, I immediately try to find a way of highlighting that and turning it into something more positive."

With the possible exception of Ben Ainslie, who seems able to turn anger into positive aggression, it is striking just how calm and level-toned most of the world's great sailors remain - even in the midst of a crisis. Russell Coutts is well known for this, and Paul Cayard says he has worked hard to manage himself in the way that Paul Brotherton has been describing.

The difficult part of this for us part-time weekend sailors is finding the time to practise these new habits. As Paul point out: "In the first instance it's a real effort to forge new habits. People feel comfortable doing the things they've always done, irrespective of whether it's a useful habit or not. When you break that and put in a new process, it feels awkward, it feels uncomfortable because you have to think about it. But once you've done it 50, 60, 500 or 600 times, it then becomes a natural process, you don't have to think about it. It just gets done." But I suspect that even realising the fact that the way you think is a choice rather than an accident is a revelation to many of us. When you fluff a spinnaker hoist and get rolled by 10 boats, it's hard not to get your knickers in a twist. But does it really help to think that way? Probably not.

So, for £240 a year, you can get access to one of the most enlightening people in dinghy sailing. Set against the cost of a new sail and what this knowledge could do for your sailing, that seems like pretty good value. At first glance, mysailingcoach.com deserves to do well. It opens up a new way of thinking that until now has been the preserve of the Olympic and top youth sailors. Meanwhile, Paul is planning on putting his money where his mouth is by having a serious go at winning the 29er World Championships in Weymouth this July. Having teamed up with one of his former protégés, Mari Shepherd, Paul won the windless John Merricks Tiger Trophy in a 29er, so already they appear to be well on track. With the 29er Worlds taking place alongside the 49er European Championships, Paul is armed and ready for the inevitable joshing that he will receive from his old 49er mates for racing in a ‘kid's boat'. Paul does a fearsome line in northern wit and repartie, however, so heaven help anyone who tries to take the mickey. Emotionally neutral he won't be!