2 Must Haves In Parent Goals

Summary

• Parents should have goals, or intentions, set when developing their kid into an athlete.
• Athlete goals and parent goals are not the same. We shouldn’t mix our own goals of making it to the pros with our kid’s goals.
• As Herm Edwards said, “You play to win the game!”. Very true, but as parents we aren’t playing. Our focus is on things like effort. Set your goal to recognize and reward effort.
• Focusing on effort is important in developing an Internal Locus of Control. Giving your kid a feeling of control of their own outcome or success.
• Giving a Safe Space is the second goal you want on your list. This can have many benefits mentally and emotionally as your athlete competes in sports.
• Recognizing effort and giving a safe space can help you develop a happy, healthy, and high performing athlete.

Full Transcript

Hey, we're going over goal setting this time for parents. If you want to develop a happy, healthy, high performing athlete, you need to have these two things on your list.

Hey, my name is David Sabi here with Kid To Athlete, helping parents raise athletes. Now remember, athlete goals and parent goals are not the same. An athlete's goal is to achieve their dreams. A parent's goal is to help them build skills, tools, and character that they need so they can achieve their dreams. So like with any goal, you want to write your goals down. And two of those goals I think you should have on your list is recognizing effort and giving a safe space. You could have a lot of different goals but I think those two are very important if you want to develop a happy, healthy, high performing athlete. So let's get started. We're going to start with recognizing effort and I'd like to start the section basically with a quote from former New York Jets head coach, Herm Edwards, who said, "You play to win the game!" because that is truth.

You play to win the game. That's the whole point of playing the game. However, I believe we should focus on effort, especially parents. We need to focus on the effort, the effort your athlete puts in to winning the game. Now why or why do I encourage you to recognize and be aware of effort? It's more about control. Your athlete has control of their effort and what you're doing is you're letting them take control of what they can control. Because there's a lot of things they can't control but we're focused on what they can control. It reminds me of something called locus of control. What's locus of control? It's not a bunch of bugs swarming a field and eating all the crops, not that locust. Locus of control is basically the degree of what you believe you have control of your outcome or success. And there's two ways of going about that.

You can have internal or external. The internal locus of control is you feel like you have control of your outcomes or your success. It comes from inside, internal. On the other hand, there's the external locus of control, which everything is externally. Other people or the environment or something outside of you is in control of your outcome or success. Now as parents, we definitely want our kids to have the control that they need so they can succeed and we need to make sure we start with recognizing effort because they have control of that effort. If they get into habits of putting in the effort, then they will be successful. So win or lose, you want to recognize the effort your athlete put in there because they have control of that. There's a lot of things that they don't have control. They don't have control of the ref, they don't have control the weather or the field they're playing on or whatever environment they're in, but they have control of their effort.

So recognize effort. Put it on the list of goals that you have to help your athlete develop into a happy, healthy, high performing athlete. Because if it becomes habit for your athlete, they're going to be not only successful in sports, but they will be in school and maybe career or business, whatever they take on.

Secondly, we're going to go over giving a safe space. What's giving a safe space? Well, it's easiest to describe it in a story, so let's take little Johnny. Little Johnny is playing soccer. He's trying all these new moves he saw on TV and he's failing big time. Gets done with the game, comes off the field and has to hear about all the mistakes he made on the ride home, at dinner, all the way until he gets to bed. I wouldn't consider that time off the field a safe space.

Take scenario two. You got little Johnny trying all these new moves that he saw on TV and failing big time, but when he gets off the field, he can just be. He can just be a kid or what I like to call an athlete in recovery mode, right? You don't always have to be in the sport that you're doing. So what we're looking at is giving your athlete a little bit of time to just recover and to be safe. It kind of boils down to the limits. Well, let's take the scenario that we started with. Little Johnny does all his moves, fails, comes off the field, not a safe space. Next game, little Johnny goes back on and plays it safe. His limit is here, but he plays in this level down here because of the consequences of off the field.

Scenario two, little Johnny tries all of these things, keeps messing up, keeps messing up. Well, gets off the field, safe space. He's okay. He knows that he can do whatever he needs to in the game and then he'll be safe and it's okay after. Why is that so important? Well, it's about the limits to your little Johnny or your kid will be pushing their limits and again, not being afraid of pushing your limits. They'll continue pushing until they push their limits up. When their limits go up, their level goes up, their capabilities go up, their skills go up. And so what we're doing is we're trying to get our athlete from this level, or their limits here, up. And giving a safe space allows for that because they know they're going to be okay. They know they can keep hitting that limit and forcing that limit to go up and it's going to be okay if they step off the field. So you must give a safe space. I highly recommend putting it in your goals. It's kind of a must for developing a happy, healthy, high performing athlete.

You want your athlete, your kid to feel safe. And if your kid's not pushing limits, maybe analyze why and it might be because they're afraid of something. Are they afraid of, that it's not going to be safe after the game or after practice or off the field, right? So look into giving your child a safe space. Every kid is different. So how you do that, how you implement it is going to be a little different for everybody. Some people like to talk about it, some people don't. If your kid likes to talk about it, first thing I would ask is, "What do you think you need help with? Or how do you think you can improve or better your skills or push your limits?" And one of the biggest questions I think you can ask your athlete is, "How can I help? How can I, as a parent, help you develop what you need to to take it to another level, to push your limits and capabilities up?"

 So make sure you write down, recognizing effort and giving a safe space and watch your athlete improve and become a happy, healthy, high performing athlete.

 Well, that's all I have for you for today. I hope you enjoy this video. Give it a thumbs up if you liked it. Hit that subscribe button and I will see you on the next one.