How To Overcome Fear And Build Confidence For Youth Athletes With Ethan Skolnick and Andrea Corn
Channel: Mental Toughness Trainer
Date: 13/12/2013

http://www.mentaltoughnesstrainer.com How To Overcome Fear And Build Confidence For Youth Athletes

Because we are talking about youth sports and we are not talking about  high school or college, it is very important in these tender years. You want to be able to motivate through being helpful and making constructive suggestions,  because intimidation and belittling is not going to be effective at all. It is very  important for parents who may believe their child is talented, or even for the coach  who is trying to motivate through fear of failure, it is not going to work. It is going  to have the opposite effect. If anything, that is going to undermine the child's  self-confidence. 

They are still learning how to play these games. If Jason Taylor says, "Hey, we don't get it right every time," so why be so hard on the kid who is just learning? Whether  it is how to tackle, whether how to throw a pass, whatever the sport may be, you  have to have that latitude to be accepting and so the child can accept him or  herself. 

We created a chapter basically on failure, because a lot of parents are  afraid of their kids failing and they are afraid of how it reflects on them when their  kids fail. They are living vicariously through their kids, so they see this as some  kind of shortcoming on their own part. They don't treat the kids in a way the kids  feel like they can recover from it. 

I went to a lot of athletes to ask that question, "What was your biggest failure?"  They were extremely happy to talk about it. Mostly because they felt, almost  uniformly again, that it was a defining moment in their lives. It did not take them  long to come up with examples. We have numerous examples from Chipper Jones  leaving his bat out of his shoulder when he was in a championship game; to Shane  Battier shanking a punt in front of 70,000 people in a punt pass competition; to  Chris Mullin who would go on to the Hall of Fame scoring on his own basket when he was nine years old. 

What we got from them on a consistent basis was that somebody was there to tell them it was alright. It didn't mean that it was alright to fail and that you shouldn't  try to practice and get better, but that failure is a part of sports. There is a winner  and loser in every situation. The best baseball players in the world don't get hits 70 percent of the time. The best quarterbacks in the world don't complete 40 percent  of their passes on a regular basis. The whole idea was getting that message across  to the kids that you are going to fail again, but next time if you want to give yourself a better chance to succeed, you have to practice. You have to put in the time. That was what we got.

What I think will help parents is again to understand that for every game  that is played one team is going to win and one team is going to lose. Children in  elementary school and early middle can be very concrete thinkers meaning they  see things in black and white. If they lose, they feel like they are losers, but losing  does not make you a loser. It is very important that parents make that point to  children. Yes, your team may have lost, but there can always be something  constructive or positive that they can point out. "Look, you got to second base. Or  look how many baskets you got to shoot. Or how many minutes you played." 

What they have to find is within the game things that they can bring out and tell  their children to help their children not to just define it in these all or nothing terms.  There are going to be games where the team wins and the child did not play well or  the child played superbly and their team lost. They have to be able to take away  from all of these situations. Rather than having the child fear failure and be so  afraid of their team losing, in a way you have to embrace it. You have to help them  understand that it is going to happen. It is going to be okay. There is going to be  another day. You going to go out again and you are going to play. 

Rather than being something to be afraid of and avoid, look at all the lessons that  you learned. You need to learn how to be resilient. You don't want to just give up  and quit. Because everything that happens truly on the playing field, is a metaphor  for another classroom whether it is in school or later on in life. You have to learn  how to deal with adversity. You have to learn to deal with difficult situations such as a loss and a defeat, but it doesn't mean you are defeated. It is just a game.

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