Then by 11.00am on the Tuesday of that week it was all over. She was called into the coach’s office to be told she was no longer needed in the squad, and she was sent home. Quite simply, they liked the look of other players more, budgets were tight and there was no room for maybes.

There was no opportunity to prepare for an end that came with no warning. It was traumatising for her as a player. Her sporting dreams and hopes for her future were shattered in a matter of minutes. As her parents, who had invested in her journey through school, club, university, national squads and had watched every one of her 20 senior international caps, it was the toughest test of our emotional strength as we grappled to find the right words and actions to support her.

Roll forward to 2023, she now has a successful career at JP Morgan in London. She is happier and healthier than she has ever been. She still plays hockey for her club, coaches regularly and received the ‘Most Improved Player’ award in the year after she left the GB Programme. She makes time for a large and varied group of friends and even has time to date. She feels valued and appreciated by all those around her.

What more could a parent ask for?

But what happened in-between?

There was certainly a lot of messy bits, but having had some space to reflect on the things we learnt, here are my top 10 tips for parents to support an athlete who is suddenly dropped and needs to transition into the real world.

• Prepare for the end BEFORE it’s the end.

Encourage your child to take every opportunity to figure out who they are outside of sport, whilst they are still playing. They need to test out some stuff and work out what they like or don’t like so they develop a sense of where their future career direction after sport might lead. It sounds counter-intuitive to suggest this as a parent when your child has to be 100% committed to their sporting goals, but it is essential.

Unless they are fully committed to staying in their sport in some capacity apart from playing, when the end comes your child will need to fall back on the relationships they have built and experiences they have had outside of sport. If they don’t have any it’s going to be tough to start from scratch at a point when they have lost their sporting identity and are at their lowest. So champion and develop the whole child and not just the sports player, because actually no one else around them in their world is really interested in that apart from you.

In practical terms for us this meant fighting our daughter’s corner to ensure she could attend those rites of passage events alongside her peers, supporting her to give back to the sport by sharing her story and mentoring others, facilitating networking conversations, using our connections to help her find short bursts of work experience in different environments and never letting her consider giving up on her academic potential. By optimising her skill sets in all other aspects of her life she would be able to maximise her opportunities later on.

• Be their safe space

When the end comes unexpectedly letting go of the sporting dream is like a bereavement. The emotions come tumbling in with the same intensity; not necessarily in any order – shock, anger, regret, fear of the future, frustration, resentment, depression and intense sadness.

We had to fight hard not to give in to our natural instincts to want to take the pain away by distracting or just ignoring the feelings out of her, as it was so upsetting for us too. But we knew when feelings are suppressed they do not disappear; they merely go into hiding where they fester and cause trouble later in life.

We were the only place our daughter could show up as her raw true self with no filters. With everyone and everywhere else she had to be brave. So put your hard hat on, get the tissues out and let them cry and rant and rave with you. Don’t try and make it better or play down the emotion, just acknowledge how hard it must be to be them and let them feel heard. Validate their emotions. Also, accept that alongside the science of selection and performance chance and luck play their part and sometimes sport just doesn’t feel fair.

• Call in the cavalry

When the chips are down you need people around you who can shed sunshine and offer light relief in the toughest of times. We were blessed to spend time with our other daughter immediately after the news hit. She was like a breath of fresh air, had never really understood what all the fuss with sport was all about and offered just the sort of perspective we all needed. Sport had stolen her sister and she was very much looking forward to having her back and seeing her have some fun. Within a matter of hours the two of them were laughing and crying all at the same time. Whoever your cavalry are, call them in.

• Allow them time to grieve and process.

They need space to sit with their feelings and emotions and this must be the focus. Don’t interrogate – you may want to understand all the issues, but they may not be ready to talk yet. They may never be. Let them set the pace and the agenda. Be prepared to cover the same ground a lot, as every time you do they will get closer to accepting and acknowledging the enormity of what has happened. This ultimately leads to them having space to process, move on and work out their next steps.

There is no formula or script about what to say or do. This is the time to use your intuition as a parent. Back off when you feel you should, be present when you feel you should. Remind them constantly how proud you are of what they have achieved and that you don’t love them any less because their elite sporting journey has ended. Their feelings are real and understandable. But they will pass.

• Show up as parents in a way that is useful!

Remember we cannot change what has happened, we can only change how we respond to the situation. Being as devastated as they are will not help. Taking it personally will not help. It is very unlikely anything you could have done or said would have changed anything. Letting this trigger you about failures in your own past will not help. This is your stuff and not their stuff. It will just add to their burden.

So focus on the things you can control, rather than the things you can’t; this stops everything feeling so overwhelming. As a practical example we agreed a plan to communicate the news to all friends and family. We also chose to message the parents on the team that we knew well rather than allow the news to seep out. We told them the facts, thanked them for their friendship and wished the team success for the future. We explained we had no regrets as a family and thanked them for the experiences we had shared. We set the tone and didn’t need to face any awkward conversations as we had broken the ice.

• Encourage them to get closure

Walking away from the thing they love is the hardest thing, but leaving with things unsaid is worse and will prevent your child from moving on.

Saying an appropriate goodbye when the time is right is vital. By ‘appropriate’ I mean a good and positive goodbye to support staff, teammates, and coaches. To do this with grace and humility was testament to our daughter’s personality and bravery. She held her head high and showed no sign of bitterness. We could not have been more proud.

Once the dust settled and she could think with clarity it was also important for her to take the opportunity to say her piece to her coaches and tell them truthfully what had worked and not worked for her whilst she had been part of the squad. It wasn’t going to change their decision, but she felt strongly about certain issues and she felt better for having voiced her views.

• Accept that moving to the next chapter is not straight forward

Every set back is a growing opportunity, but as parents we cannot say this too soon. Change rarely happens in one big shift so we need to be patient. For elite athletes it is particularly hard as they have had to develop deeply ingrained patterns of thinking and strict routines and rituals to survive at the top. It will take a while to unpick this focus and to open up their mind to new ways of thinking.

It may take an ongoing cycle of disorientation, reflection, experimenting with new ideas, practice, taking stock, iterating, then giving it another go before their updated version of themselves takes shape.  What is important is that they embrace the opportunity to figure out who they are outside of sport and as parents we support them on this voyage of discovery. There is no magic solution or formula that works for everyone.

They may not know what they want yet but trying something will help them figure things out, be it part time work, voluntary work, a short course or work experience; athletes need some sort of a routine, otherwise they just feel unhinged. It doesn’t have to be all encompassing, but something alongside the processing of the pain will help normalise things and set them on the path of discovering what they actually want to do longer term.

• Encourage them to enjoy being in control of their own destiny

Taking an immediate extended break and travelling abroad would have been an easy option for our daughter to take, but she said she felt like this would be ‘running away’. How wise she was. She elected to process and think about her future first, rather than put her future on hold.

By her own admission her personal development had been exponential since leaving the confines of the GB programme and we observed and supported her taking full control of her life. She had never felt this as an athlete and she began to feel empowered and excited to make plans that no one else could take away from her.

• Focus on the learnings, rather than what they have lost

Top companies love athletes that are transitioning as they are strong, ambitious, hardworking, determined and resilient individuals. All the qualities companies are looking for to build an agile and productive workforce.

As a family we soon recognised just how many skills our daughter had honed on her sporting journey that could transfer into the workplace. The more we all practiced using this sort of language the more her self-esteem grew. It wasn’t a surprise to hear she was performing well in interviews and most significantly she was doing it all without us.  It was time for us to take a big step back and leave her to get on with her life.

• Regret nothing

I now understand it isn’t the medals or accolades she won that counts, it’s the stories, the life lessons, the fun, the joy, the pain and the memories we shared that matters most. We are closer and more resilient as a family for having been on this journey together and we have all learnt a lot about ourselves.

Sport is a privilege. Our daughter is still playing, we are still watching, and we are very grateful for that opportunity.

Stephanie Burge is an ICF Accredited Life Coach who runs her own private coaching practice, Lemon Zest Coaching. She is also an Independent Consultant at ThirdEYE International Sports Consultancy where she collaborates with parents, athletes, sports clubs and communities using her lived experience as a parent of a GB athlete. She talks about strategies to develop the whole person both on and off the pitch to optimise playing potential, without compromising their ability to become happy, healthy well-rounded individuals, ready to maximise their opportunities after their sporting career has ended.

Esme Burge is a former full-time England and GB Hockey Player with a first-class honours degree in Psychology from the University of Nottingham. She was the BUCS female athlete of the year in 2020 and was a member of the British Universities and Colleges Sports Advisory Group. She was recruited by J.P.Morgan via their Veteran & Athlete Transition Programme. She currently plays Premier League Hockey for Hampstead and Westminster where she also coaches.  

Despite being only 20 herself, Kinsella was the most experienced member of the young GB team and had to not only shake off her disappointing qualifications performance from two days previous, but also lead and support her team through their first Olympic Final. Overcoming any feelings of doubt in herself, Kinsella had a stellar Team Final performance, improving all her qualification scores and leading Team GB to a Bronze Medal!

So, how did she do it? How do you overcome failure and replace it with success under such pressure? The key here is resilience.

Gymnastics is known for its graceful, powerful, and spectacular nature with young gymnasts performing impressive skills on a range of apparatus. Historically, the image of very young, slightly built gymnasts performing extraordinarily challenging skills springs to mind; inevitably that means top gymnasts have to be training with considerable intensity from a very young age.

Although gymnastics is slowly moving away from that idea and forming a more holistic approach along with a number of other sports, it is true that some sports do need to have a certain degree of specific training and skill acquisition before undergoing puberty to help them be successful. However, these sports are few and far between and certainly do not encompass as many sports as people believe.

This poses several challenges for coaches and parents; not least how to help them succeed without mental or physical harm.

Due to the nature of gymnastics, young athletes experience challenges they may perceive as stressful or as failure; a sub-optimal competition, suffering a skill block, or even managing injury can have profound psychological effects. As a coach and parent team, part of our job is to teach athletes early on how to bounce back from worrying events, how to cope when things go wrong and how to celebrate smaller positives in sport.

So, what is resilience, and how can we help our young athletes develop it so that they stay mentally healthy in their sport and develop the psychological strength to remain comfortable throughout the inevitable twists and turns of a competitive sporting experience? What develops resilience and how can we, as coaches and parents, support our young athletes in gaining this core life skill alongside their physical training?

Unravelling the Mysteries of Resilience.

Resilience is defined as “the role of mental processes and behaviour in promoting personal assets and protecting an individual from the potential negative effect of stressors.” In simpler terms, this means the personality traits an individual displays that prevents them becoming overwhelmed or discouraged by stressful events, for example a bad training session or the death of a family member.

Resilience falls into 2 broad types – robust and rebound resilience:

• Robust resilience refers to a protective quality that allows an athlete to maintain their performance and mental wellbeing under pressure.
• Rebound resilience refers to an athlete’s ability to bounce back and return to a normal state of cognitive functioning following short-term disruptions to training or mental health.

So, what does a resilient athlete look like?

We now know what resilience is, but what does it look like when in a day-to-day setting. Well, resilient athletes:

• Are better able to challenge negative thoughts and ideas, improving their belief in themselves and their ability.
• Are more likely to be able to focus on tasks without becoming distracted. This is particularly important during competitions!
• Will display characteristics of optimism and competitiveness, meaning when they have pre-competition butterflies, they will view it as a positive experience that will help them perform well.
• Will be proactive and take matters into their own hands. These athletes will be more likely to do extra conditioning or practise in their own time to improve performance.
• Are perfectionists (but not the “I’m not good enough type”)! They will set themselves high standards and expect that they meet these standards, but they won’t beat themselves up if things go slightly pear-shaped.

Resilience is key not only for training and competitions, but also for a young persons mental health. A happy athlete will want to learn, improve themselves and succeed. An unhappy athlete will be afraid to try in case they fail.

This sounds very important, but how can I help as a parent?

Although resilience is a personality trait, it is also process which individuals go through in response to their environment. This means that there are things that parents can do that influence internal processing and external environment to set young athletes up for success.

Influencing the Internal:

Encourage positive behaviour: help your child practice the behaviours above. Encourage them to be proactive and set themselves high standards. Try and set a good example by practicing the behaviours yourself, your children will copy you!

Reassure them when things go wrong: there isn’t a straight line to success, plans change and sometimes things go wrong. Turn the threat into a challenge, for example if they have a knee injury use it as an opportunity to develop their understanding/tactical awareness, rather than seeing it as lost time!

Be supportive: make sure your child feels like they have someone to turn to whenever they need advice or just a pep talk. Figure 1 shows the different types of support athletes of all ages may need throughout their career.

Changing the External.

Below are some things coaches and clubs can do to create a facilitative environment conducive to success:

We’re all in this together attitude: without trying to sound like the cast of high school musical, coaches need to encourage everyone to work together. This means coaches, parents AND athletes all working together to create, work towards and achieve goals.

Safe risk taking: Athletes should be free to take sensible risks in training and push themselves out of their comfort zones. Create a safe and supportive environment they can do this in, don’t get angry or punish them if things go wrong, it’s all part of learning.

Accountability and responsibility: encourage athletes to be responsible for their actions, don’t blame poor results on just luck (if you lose because of luck, then surely winning is luck too?). Help athletes be accountable for their actions in training, that way when they do get the result they want, they will know it was because of their hard work and dedication.

Develop coach-athlete relationships: your athletes are more than just small machines who come to training 3 or 4 times a week. They have hobbies, likes and dislikes so try and take the time to get to know them or ask them about their day. They are more likely to seek feedback and reassurance from you. They want to know you care about them, make sure you show it!

To round it all up.

To sum up, psychological resilience is a mechanism that allows athletes to overcome stressful events and quickly return to normal functioning. Resilience can help us appraise threatening situations and turn them into something challenging yet manageable.

Resilience is important, not just during sport but throughout life. Most people will encounter failure a lot more than success, so we need to give children the tools to manage this without compromising their mental health.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of ways to improve psychological resilience, instead just some ideas to implement in your sport or home setting that will help your athlete work towards their goals and be the best they can be.

It still did not prepare me for that moment or indeed the shock at the words, ‘the club are going to release him.’

For once I was lost for words as a myriad of feelings swarmed over me. I was in shock; it was not expected and despite living and breathing this work I struggled to comprehend what had just happened and how we were going to break the news to our 11-year-old son.  This despite having the benefit of helping support parents go through the same process across a number of different sports over the last few years.

The initial feeling as a sporting parent is one of hurt, often we feel that we have to go on the offensive either criticising the process, the people selecting the team or those involved with the coaching.  Hopefully, most of us keep these feelings to ourselves however difficult that may be, but if we are not careful, we can often forget the most important person in this experience and that is our children.

We certainly felt this way and no advice can help prepare you for the moment you have to break the news to your child and watch them physically and emotionally crumple in front of you.  We simply had to do it and be led with conversation by our son’s responses to it whilst not having all the answers that he wanted but promising him that we would do our best to find out.

I do have to say the resilience of young people never ceases to amaze me and whilst both me and my wife have struggled to come to terms with the news, within 24 hours he was already thinking ahead to his cricket matches this week, looking forward to welcoming a new puppy to home and ‘taking the mick’ out of his dad whilst playing golf with him.

It has reiterated much of what we talk about that the child’s view of the sporting experience can be very distorted to how we think it should look and feel for them.

If we are proactive as sports parents and create a positive environment at home, we can try to be balanced in our view and try to prepare our children for all possible outcomes.

Having spoken to Steve Sallis(author of Educating Football)  on the ‘Parents in Sport Podcast’ about the good, the bad and the ugly of football academies, we wondered if  ‘RELEASED’  should not be a dirty word and something that we should not be surprised to encounter at some point on the journey and be more prepared for as parents.  This should not land solely as the responsibility of parents but also with clubs perhaps also being more honest and realistic with parents from the very beginning of the journey.

From our experience of working across Premier League and Football League clubs in the last couple of seasons this is something that is now been addressed in many cases much more effectively.

Of course, we never hope that being released will ever happen but the chances of it are so high that perhaps we were naive in not being more prepared, although I think subconsciously with our approach we may well be giving ourselves less credit than we deserve.

One thing that we certainly must be emphasising on a regular basis is that only through hard work and a great attitude to training can our children be expected to even be considered for selection. We have been huge advocates of this, yet there are still no guarantees.

We are by no means saying that you should be negative or too pessimistic, but we must strike a balance between this and unrealistic optimism.

It shows how difficult it can be as a parent as if you go too far one way you run the risk of discouraging them, if you are pessimistic or if you are at the other end of the scale the disappointment after all the expectation can be even harder to take.  This seems like common sense, but it is amazing how many parents find themselves at either end of this scale.

If your child is not selected, you need to understand how they will be feeling.  They are bound to take it personally; it is an attack on their self-esteem and none of us like to feel rejected.  It can be made even harder by the fact that your child will probably have to watch some of their friends go off and participate and will feel that they are missing out from a social perspective as well.

So as a sporting parent what can we do to manage this?  Here are a few useful pointers:

Don’t Overreact – as mentioned earlier, as emotions run high it is very easy to make poor decisions that we may regret later.  Allow some time to cool off, reflect before acting.  One thing is for certain make sure you praise your child and tell them how proud you are of them for giving it a go. I could not have been prouder of him that two days later he captained his district and put the football kit back on and turned in a solid performance. My pride in my children has never been on what they achieve but on their character traits, how they are as humans and their ability to react and respond appropriately to all the different challenges that young people face growing up.

Offer huge emotional support – let your child talk.  Let them express their feelings, let them express anger and frustration at how it all went.  Even if you disagree with what they may say, listen to it from their perspective, this will be useful to you moving forward.  Certainly, do not squash your child at this stage, it is really important as parents that we do not play it all down and tell them for example ‘that it’s only a game’ or ‘there is always next time’.  Let them talk, sometimes silence or even telling them that you feel their pain with them can act as a huge support. Our son did not have a lot to say initially but as the week has worn on, he has shared more and more. Keeping him busy, doing activities that allow you to participate and talk at the same time have certainly been on huge benefit and it has helped us to plan and prepare for the next few months.

Encourage and don’t create an excuse for them – be positive and encourage your child. Try not to make excuses for your child.  Instead talk to them about the selection process, ask them questions that allow them to reflect on what they think.  Who are the best players?  Who do you think you are better than and what might you do next time?

Speak to the coach – if you are totally disillusioned with the decision then after at least 48 hours consider speaking with your child’s coach.  It would be even better if you could get your child to go and ask for some feedback on what they need to improve on but this can be very hard for younger players.  This chat needs to be non-confrontational and should only be used as an avenue to plan a route forward. I definitely think this is of huge benefit as it allows everyone to move on.

Plan ahead – can you plan the next stage? What can you do to help support your child?  Do they want to continue to fight for their place in a team?  Do they want to continue playing academy football or go back to grassroots?  Really listen to their response.  If so, how can you best support them using the information that they your child and their coach has given you?

Stay connected – speak to people that you trust for impartial advice. I have been incredibly grateful for the support I have received from football academy staff from organisations we work with, former coaches, schoolteachers and other contacts within the sports industry who I have great relationships with. On reflection, staying in contact with former grassroots coaches and the clubs our children were involved in before the academy experience can help with integrating them back into these environments if this is the chosen path.

Play lots of sports- one thing that missed selection highlights is the need to make sure that your child is involved in a myriad of different sporting activity.  If you only play one sport and this selection process is the be all and end all either at the weekend or as part of a representative process, then it can be all the more difficult for your child to take or even be motivated to continue.  If they are involved in lots of sports and different teams, any type of failure like this can be kept in a far greater context.

One final thing to be aware of is that many early selection processes around the world are heavily in favour of the more physically and emotionally developed athlete.  Many of these athletes being born in the early part of the sporting calendar year.

In making long term decisions and trying to keep things in perspective, recognise that this may be a phase your child will need to go through.  It does not mean that further down the line they will not be selected ahead of some of their peers, so keep encouraging and keep motivating them!

Who knows what will happen next? No one has a crystal ball…..

“I want ride down this way, Dad.”

It was an option that I hadn’t even considered. My 3-year-old daughter was pointing down a grass slope that stretched down and away from the concrete path on which we stood.

I hesitated for a moment. This would be by far the most difficult thing she had attempted on the balance bike. After receiving the bike for her third birthday some months before, progress had been intermittent, as was her interest. She had always tired quickly of any “practice” even sometimes protesting at the mere suggestion of getting the bike out. Her improvement had taken a bit of an upturn lately – she was now able to generate a little bit of speed on a flat surface – but the prospect of racing down a hill was entirely different to riding around in front of our garage.

I expected a tentative attempt from her, but once she was in position at the lip of the slope, she kicked off and rolled over the edge. I jogged after her, watching anxiously. She built up speed as she ran her feet along the ground on either side of the bike, she a wobbled a little but maintained control. She was going faster than ever before when she lifted both feet off the ground and coasted . . . and coasted . . . and kicked again . . . and coasted some more. She rode faster and further than she ever had before. It was a huge improvement. A monumental leap forward. I was proud, relieved and frankly amazed.

When she finally came to a stop she looked up at me triumphantly and shouted: “Again!” She immediately wheeled her bike around and rode it back up the hill.

This scene was repeated about a dozen times with only fatigue preventing her from continuing.

Her energy, enthusiasm, and perseverance for the activity was in such contrast to previous efforts, it made me wonder what had happened. The dad in me was proud and amazed, and the coach in me was curious.

Athlete-Driven Action

What I had witnessed that day with my daughter was similar to what we should be striving to facilitate as parents and coaches: an enthusiasm and persistence that is completely child-driven.  This is not always possible, but there are times where we can allow this to happen.

It got me thinking.

If we can stumble upon situations that motivate kids to attack what was previously difficult or uninteresting for them, can we subsequently learn to intentionally craft an environment around young children that generates such buy-in and engagement in a sporting domain?

If so, we firstly need to be alert to what factors lead to such self-driven engagement. So, what worked for my daughter?

In hindsight, I suspect that a number of things aligned on the day to provide such a  positive experience for her.

Autonomy

My daughter chose to ride down that hill and completely drove the activity herself. There was no instruction or cajoling from any outside source.

Autonomy is critical to intrinsic (internal) motivation. Intrinsic motivation is a higher quality form of motivation than being motivated extrinsically (from an outside source).

A child is most likely to try something with vigour if it is their idea and driven from within.

Takeaway

Parents should be trying to help their children by guiding and nudging but not taking over the experience.

Coaches should constantly search for ways to turn a sporting experience over to the athletes. Set the scene, and then get out of their way.

 

Desirable Difficulty

The hill was of just the right gradient and length for my daughter’s current level of confidence.

Sensible progressions of a task at a level of desirable difficulty will create feelings of competence and confidence, also critical to intrinsic motivation.

Tasks that are too easy are met with apathy and indifference. Those that are too hard create fear and frustration. Either way, kids will try to avoid them.

Takeaway

Parents should try to set goals and challenges with their children that are realistic.

Coaches need to keep activities within a young athlete’s realistic skill set. Don’t try to rush or jump ahead to quickly.

Safety

The slope that my daughter chose to tackle was a large, open grassed area.

The attraction to a novice rider now seems obvious and I shouldn’t be too surprised that my daughter was drawn to it. There was nothing to collide with and the surface was reasonably forgiving in case of a fall.

Had the surface been concrete and the area full of trees would my daughter have tried coasting down the hill at speed? Probably not. It seems obvious, but creating an environment that is manageable for a learner makes them more likely to try.

Takeaway

Parents need to ensure that their children are in safe learning environments that will allow them to thrive.

Coaches need to create environments in which the athletes feel safe. Remove factors that may cause fear.

Fun and Unstructured Play

There was no sense that the ride down the slope was “practice”. There was no formality about the activity. My daughter was just playing. It was fun, unstructured, spur of the moment stuff.

The presence of fun and play will make it more likely that the kids will engage with and buy into an activity.

Takeaway

Parents need to allow as much free play as possible allowing children to make up the games/challenges, trying not to turn the back garden play time into another coaching session.

Coaches need to plan to make practice tasks feel like play. Look to “gamify” as many activities as possible.

Meaning

Despite the activity being a form of play, it had meaning and intent. The challenge of riding down a hill without falling off has far more real life application that rolling around on a flat square of concrete with no real destination in mind.

Dreariness deters. Meaning motivates.

Takeaway

Parents should try to make games/activities fun, with challenge and perhaps a little bit of competition.

Drills are often dreary. Coaches need to create activities for kids that contain a game, challenge or competition element.

Absence of Expectation

There was no expectation of success when my daughter first kicked off at the top of the slope. There was no pressure. There was nothing at stake. There was nothing to lose.

Unwanted expectation can cause kids to shy away and avoid activities, or perform well below their best due the anxiety that can result.

Takeaway

Parents should try to ensure that their patience does not exceed expectation and have too many pre planned thoughts about what they are expecting to see.

Coaches need to avoid placing unwanted expectation on young athletes.

Early Success

The fact that my daughter’s first attempt was successful and without incident cannot be ignored. It was critically important to her confidence and subsequent eagerness to repeat the activity over and over.

Takeaway

Parents should try to ensure that their child is experiencing some form of success.  Too much failure can lead to children becoming disillusioned and unmotivated.

Early on , coaches should deliberately structure activities to make it more likely that athletes will experience success.

Encouragement, Empathy and Patience

In hindsight, as a long-term coach, I should be well aware that any type of skill or talent does not emerge in a linear fashion. It can consist of long plateaus, backwards steps and triumphant breakthroughs – pretty much what had occurred as my daughter learned to ride a bike.

I had tried to be patient all along. While disappointed when on previous occasions she wanted to stop practising, I accepted it. I gently encouraged, I didn’t push. I didn’t rant and yell when she gave up. Each time she got on the bike, no matter for how short a time, I saw it all as helping her. I was hopeful that even when she didn’t appear to be progressing, maybe she was.

Encouragement, empathy and patience are keys to motivating kids to try something and persist with it in the long term. There is no use forcing kids to do things. We know that external motivation is a low quality form of motivation. Give kids a chance. They may not try it now but maybe will when they are good and ready. Don’t burn the bridge to future attempts with impatience, pestering or berating.

Takeaway

Parents and coaches need to recognise and respect a young athlete’s feelings. Engage with them and don’t dismiss their emotions.

Conclusion

On reflection, it seems that the success of this experience was due to it being driven by my daughter in a supportive, safe, fun environment, devoid of expectation but full of meaning for her.  I provided the means and the opportunity, then became a supportive bystander. The experience was hers. She did it.

There is so much to take away here from a parental and coaching perspective. If the factors that contribute to positive experiences for children can be identified, the challenge for parents and youth sports coaches is to deliberately attempt to replicate these factors within their family activities and coaching sessions. In this instance they occurred mostly unconsciously on my part; ideally youth sports coaches should work to craft them by design.

Recommended Action

Take a deliberate and conscious approach to including some of the discussed elements in your dealings with young athletes. as coaches and in your day to day life as parents.  If you are faced with a child who is hesitant to try something or persist, reflect on what you can do to create an environment that will more likely see them engaged. I would love to hear what works for you. You can let me know by leaving a reply/comment or by using the contact details below.

Summary

Young children are more likely to try things and persist with them if:

1. They are given a level of autonomy.
2. The task is at a desirable level of difficulty.
3. They feel safe.
4. It involves fun and play.
5. It is meaningful to them.
6. There is an absence of unwanted expectation.
7. They experience early success.
8. They are supported with encouragement, empathy and patience.

Thank you to Darren Wensor, a big supporter of our site for contributing this blog.  You can find out more about his work with young athletes here.

One of the biggest findings of the study for us was in the parental role, not overly illustrated here.  Super Champion parents were involved and encouraging but in no way were they overbearing.

Also, the super champions were likely to have suffered failure along the way and their journey was a much rockier path than you may expect.  It is tempting as parents to try and step in and protect our children from negative experiences and failure, but these remain a vital part of the learning process.

To learn more about the study, please click here to take you to our research papers.

Gareth Bale’s amazing, instinctive overhead kick, and the mistakes by the Liverpool goalkeeper Loris Karius, which turned out to be the difference between the two sides.

The reaction to the mistakes was predictable. Derision on social media. Questions about the amount of money professional footballers are paid. Judgement and opinions that the ‘keeper’s performance would ‘haunt him for the rest of his life’.

All of which suggests that many of those who watch and comment on sport have a somewhat limited understanding of how our minds really work.

Despite increased curiosity and attention on the inner game, we don’t understand true nature of the human experience.

Is ‘state of mind’ important?

More and more is written and spoken about the mental side of the games we play. Even in junior sport more attention is being given to what is going on in ‘the top two inches.’

This has led to confusion for both parents and young athletes over where the line between enjoyment and player wellbeing, and performance should be.

‘Mental performance coaching’ has become a big business, offering techniques and strategies to individual athletes and teams to try to boost performance. Coaches and players look to find a competitive edge, to reduce or eliminate mistakes such as the ones which happened in the final.

To my mind, sports psychology is a discipline built on extremely shaky foundations.

The premise seems to be, that by controlling thoughts and feelings, athletes are more likely to attain a state of mind where a good performance is produced at will, and bad performances are less likely to occur.

This idea is highly questionable.

There is an assumption is that one particular state of mind (positive, relaxed, confident etc) is better than another in terms of sporting performance.

There is a belief that human beings can in control the content of the thinking which comes to them from moment to moment.

Most athletes can remember a time when they didn’t feel great, but produced a good performance nevertheless.

Every athlete can remember a time when they felt relaxed and confident but for some reason, they didn’t play as well as their state of mind suggested they should.

Therefore, is the proposition that you need to be in a particular state of mind in order to perform well a valid one?

Surely the definition of mental toughness or resilience is the understanding that your thinking  or your state of mind has no power to affect or limit your performance?

“To err is human”

As for the second theory, you can test this yourself. Sit still for one minute and think of nothing.

How did you get on?

Still believe you can control your thinking?

We think what we think when we think it.

And we can only act in accordance with the thinking we have in the moment.

How could a human being ever make a mistake, take a wrong turn, forget someone’s name, hit their own thumb with a hammer, miss saving an easy shot, if they were in control of their thoughts, feelings and actions?

Imagine what sport would be like if every single player and coach always thought and played perfectly and never made a mistake?

The human organism is made up of thousands of different chemical reactions, biological processes and functions.

How many of those do we have control over?

Blood pumping through our veins? Food being converted into energy. Our immune system fighting off infection? Reflected light being realised as images via our eyes? Falling asleep when we are tired? Waking up when we are rested?

But hey! There are two things out of the thousands we do control.

Our thoughts and our feelings.

Really? Does this make sense? Why only these two?

The truth is, we have far less control of thought and deed than we, let alone coaches and psychologists would like to believe.

When we see that this is the case, would it make us more or less likely to judge, criticise, blame or reproach a player, coach, referee or even ourselves when our performance, or that of our children isn’t matching our expectations?

The one thing we need to know

Whenever a human being is struggling, it is for one reason, and one reason alone.

They have forgotten who they really are.

They have mistaken their personal thinking, the story they are telling themselves about who they are, for the true entity, awareness, which is the fundamental, consistent element of the human experience.

The player who is upset at a mistake which resulted in her team losing has forgotten who they really are.

The coach who vents her frustration at the perceived lack of effort from a key player has forgotten who they really are.

The parent who angrily berates a young referee over a decision which cost his child’s team a place in the final has forgotten who they really are.

This veiling of our true nature is entirely innocent. It is an essential aspect of experiencing the world of form.

It is inevitable. In the heat of the moment we get caught up and we identify with the thoughts, feelings and emotions running through us.

No player wants to make a mistake.

No coach wants to judge or criticise a player’s motivation.

No parent wants to lose their cool on the sideline.

Yet all of these things happen, week in, week out, despite hours of training and practice, despite reading books and attending seminars, despite codes of conduct, rules and guidelines from governing bodies.

Here’s the issue:

It’s impossible to change or adapt behaviour just by trying to change or adapt behaviour.

We have to look at the level of understanding, of which the behaviour is the visible symptom..

When we understand, behaviour changes. When we understand that who we are is awareness itself, not our experience, our thoughts, feelings and emotions, blaming ourselves, judging others, getting angry and frustrated just doesn’t seem to make sense any more.

You are not your experience

The Liverpool goalkeeper will no doubt have some sleepless nights. Whenever he thinks about the game no doubt he will have some feelings of frustration, embarrassment, anger and sadness.

Resistance to ‘what is’ always feels painful.

If he believes those events ‘define him’, then yes, he will struggle.

But when those memories move on, to be replaced with other thoughts, his feelings will change.

Human beings only feel the experience they are having in the moment. When the experience changes, their feelings will change.

The feelings are not coming from the event, from the situation or circumstances of our lives.

How can something which happened in the past cause a feeling in us today?

It can’t. If it could wouldn’t we feel that way all the time ?

Could it be the thought which causes the feeling, not the event itself?

We are not the story we are telling ourselves about who we are.

We are the awareness of that story.

When we see the truth in this, everything else becomes clear.

There is nothing to do

The knowing of our true nature, our true being, is the knowledge on which all other knowledge is based.

It is the first thing every coach and parent should remember when they or their child starts to struggle.

If asked what advice I could give to the family and friends of Loris Karius, the answer would be simple.

‘Love him’.

There is nothing to do, no strategy to follow, no technique to implement.

We just need to remember. From the point of view of awareness, we are one being, we are connected, we are love.

From the perspective of the true self, we see that struggle is simply a symptom of misunderstanding, rather than a flaw or character defect which needs to be fixed, avoided or coped with.

We are free.

Free to play, to love,to enjoy, to compete, to win and to lose, safe in the understanding that no outcome or result can damage or affect who we really are.

This is the understanding that sport and life are constantly pointing us towards.

Because it is the only thing a human being really needs to know.

Sam Jarman is a PGA Golf Professional, Coach and Author. He advises individual players and athletes, teams and coaches in a number of different sports.

He also works with people in businesses, schools and other organisations to help them realise their innate mental health and well being.

You can find him on twitter @samjarmangolf or at www.sportsprinciples.com

So the big question is how can you help your child deal with failure?  The infographic above created by believeperform.com sums it up in a nutshell.  If you can take these messages on board many failures could soon become positive learning experiences.