Intrinsic motivation breeds greatness and it is when an athlete derives pleasure to train and improve simply because of the love for their sport. Intrinsic motivation creates curiosity, creativity and an unshakeable inner drive.
Intrinsic motivation can only come about though when your kid is truly enjoying their selves in sports and is able to compete at a high level which can only happen if your child has the ability handle STRESS. This is why I believe the ability to handle it is MAKE OR BREAK for athletes!
In part 1, I talked about the problems parents see most in their children playing competitively and again they are (2017, Mulcahy):
Lack of enjoyment
Issues with coaches
Sports becoming too competitive
Their own pressures they place on their child
Well, the first problem (lack of enjoyment) depends on how your child deals with the three situations youth athletes readily face (which are the other three problems along side lack of enjoyment).
Since this is the case, these 3 situations will be the 3 main topics of this post. I want to give you an alternative mentality when dealing with these situations, as a parent, to instill in your child for them to be great.
1. Issues With Coaches
Matt Marton/Associated Press
You can help facilitate a good relationship between your child and coach. Your child has wants and your coach has team needs so to get their wants your child must fulfill some of the team needs. If your child is helping the team win, it will be VERY hard for a coach not to play him or her. I know this ALL too well because in high school and university I would 'let out' my frustration in game and yell at the referee, coaches and players...
Me getting angry over a call the referee made
But, I also helped the team win by filling a lot of team needs defensively and offensively so I got a lot of playing time and sometimes I did 'lose it' but I controlled my emotions 'enough' to not cause too much trouble.
How a lot of parents react when their child isn't getting minutes is voicing frustration to their child's coach, but what will that get your child and what will your child learn from those kinds of exchanges? Since your child needs to take responsibility for their circumstance to change their situation (which is the next mentality your child needs), that will most likely teach them NOT to take responsibility which is contrary to athlete development!
You and your child, instead, must be strategic. This means being curious about the coaches' perspective by asking him or her questions. To get this insight, you can ask the coach:
Why your son or daughter isn’t playing as much?
What your son or daughter needs to do in order to get more playing time?
What role do you want my child playing on this team?
What the goal of the team is this year?
From those basic questions you will understand exactly what the coach expects from the team and from your child. If your child adopts this approach by simply being curious and asking questions, then taking that information to fill teams needs; not only will this strategy set your child up for more minutes and a bigger role BUT it will even give your child the opportunity to take on a leadership role.
2. Sport Becoming Too Competitive
(Troy Taromina/Pool Photo via AP)
There's a popular misconception that organized sports are too competitive for kids but I disagree. Your child most likely LOVES competition: they play video games, games on their phone, make up little competitions with their friends and when they are just playing basketball recreationally, they choose to play against each other competitively, etc.
The problem isn't competition itself, it's the fact that they don't have the mental tools to deal with high-stress situations that arise in competition (2017, Mulcahy).
Life is a competition because, in the future, your child will be competing against others for a job, for a spouse, for attention towards a cause, for admission into post-secondary school and the list goes on! So, if your child struggles with the competitive nature of sports, then he or she will most likely struggle in other areas of their life.
The first step for your child to mentally mature for greatness is helping them take responsibility for their actions. Elite players fail and failed many times in the past BUT, when they failed they took responsibility and only then can they do everything within their control to make sure they didn't fail again.
When your child puts more blame on others than they should, in their mind, they are automatically putting the onus on that person or circumstance AND NOT THEIR SELF. This means missing out on a huge opportunity to improve their game!
The more your child believes that they are to blame for their failure, the more they are taking back their power to change their situation for the better in the future. They must believe this!
An athlete with a responsible mentality looks like this:
Taking his or her's fair share of the blame for failure
Analyzing a situation to learn from it
Doing what he or she can (within their power) to improve the situation
Being optimistic and realistic
Having a victim mentality, on the other hand, looks like this:
Taking no blame
Getting defensive when criticized
Believing that you can't improve
Being overly pessimistic
3. The own pressure placed on a child from parents
You, in the parent role, have a big opportunity to lower stress in your child playing sports, because you are a big part of your child's life. So, an adjustment in your mentality can go a long way for them!
Let's first understand the psyche of most athletes. Most athletes put too much pressure on themselves. A lot of athletes are perfectionists which means they have very high expectations while competing. Ironically though, for some, perfectionist thoughts negatively affect their performance and mental health. The perfectionist thoughts that have this affect are what I call 'mental limitations' because they limit the athlete's talent.
This is why I believe if anything, you need to help your child RELAX their expectations. Kids need high expectations in competitive sports that excite them and to aim their efforts but those expectations should be attainable.
Once your child's expectations are attainable, then they must be open to the possibility of failure and you can help instill this mentality in them. It's okay for athletes to feel down about a bad performance temporarily IF the failure eventually lights a fire in them to improve.
If instead though, they have prolonged low mental health and/or it affects performance, then this will rob your child of motivation, enjoyment and the love of the game. From there, the athlete will become stagnant. Stagnant players see failure as extremely unpleasant which makes them fearful of it and you simply cannot grow if you fear failure.
You must help your child change their relationship to failure by instead instilling the mindset that success only comes about BECAUSE of adversity experienced in sports NOT despite it. Greatness requires failure AND LOTS OF IT! Elite athletes fail and learn from it because the solutions to their problems are opportunities for the most growth! The difference between athletes on the bench versus those playing big minutes is simply the fact that they have found more solutions to their problems than their counterparts!
They did this by TRYING and FAILING more than their peers, learning from that failure and eventually succeeding BECAUSE of it!
You must guide your child in changing their mentality for them to reach new levels of performance. For your son or daughter to be great, what is required from them is the adoption of a new mentality in the 3 stressful situations a lot of youth athletes find themselves in. This will relieve some of the stress athletes regularly face. Their games depends on it!
This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to stress reduction! For your child to fully be able to handle the stresses of competitive sports, check out part 3, where I go to the source of athlete's performance issues which resides deeper than surface-level thoughts. We still have more to go to help your child be great!
Continue below!
Reference:
Mulcahy, G. Why Sport Participation in Canada is Declining. (2017, June 8). Paradigm Sports.
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