Here are Confidence Hacks #4 and #5.
Your average sports parent boosts their child’s confidence by praising their achievements and reminding them that they have abilities and talents and that they can do anything they want in life if they put their mind to it. Great stuff to teach, yes, do it!
1% sports parents go beyond basic encouragement and positive self talk by utilizing the kid’s own natural ways of thinking to create SELF-CONFIDENCE so the kid is not dependent on the adult to do it for him/her. Here’s a couple of powerful ways to do that.
5 Hacks To Build Unstoppable Confidence In Youth Athletes
In this video, you are going to get the next 2 strategies to assist youth athletes to build confidence in sports.
Strategy #4. Have your kid teach you something about their sport.
Every day your kid goes to practice, he/she learns something. Often, they are unaware of what they have learned and it would be highly beneficial for them to gain that awareness so that they can reinforce it. Now, you may have tried this directly by asking something like: “How was practice? Did you learn anything?” And you will probably get one word answers like: Fine. Nope. Nothing. That rarely works. But what does work, and it’s a very under-the-radar confidence builder, is to ask more specific questions that are designed to get the kid to teach you something about the sport.
So, to get specific, you might ask things like: “I’m curious, what kind of drills did you do today? How do you think that helps you improve? What does your coach say about that? Did you do any conditioning/physical work today? What kind? I’m really curious about what muscles
that builds up for you, what do you think?
The trick here is to be genuinely curious with your questions and to ask questions that you think your kid can answer to “enlighten” and “inform” you. If you want to take it to the next level, have your kid show you how it’s done in the yard! Huge confidence builder in 2 ways, they are reinforcing their learning and feeling good about teaching you something that you don’t know.
Strategy #5. Teach your kid to be fearless
This is actually the most powerful confidence builder of them all, by far. Everybody says they want confidence when they come to me for help. I hear regularly that the problem is lack of confidence. Truthfully, though, that is rarely the real problem. It just looks like lack of confidence when it is really fear. Mostly fear of failure.
You teach kids to be fearless by creating an environment, whether you are a parent at home, or coach of a team, where taking chances is encouraged, rewarded and praised. In all of my programs, this is at the heart of what I teach kids and adults alike. Being fearless! I teach the kids how to handle difficult emotions when they get them. For adults, we go a little deeper and clear the belief patterns that trigger difficult emotions in the first place. All of my work pretty much centers around helping people eliminate useless fears and the way you do that is a 2-step method:
Make the Unknown Known and conclude that even if the worst case scenario occurs, you will be OK.
More on that later.
Let’s do this!