Help Your Kid Handle Pressure In Sports

Summary

• Pressure is inevitable when you compete in sports. Therefore, we must help equip our kids with the mindset and skills to handle it.
• Number one reason that many athletes buckle under pressure is overwhelm. They become overwhelmed when the time counts.
• Two categories of overwhelm. 1) Too many thoughts & 2) Overthinking
• Too many thoughts can be distracting to an athlete when they need to focus. Those thoughts can be relevant while others are irrelevant.
• Overthinking can overwhelm an athlete causing them to force movements and putting to many thoughts (mostly relevant) in their head when unnecessary.
• How can we help our athlete handle overwhelm? Visualization work can help by making situations familiar. So, when the pressure is on in a game, they won’t be surprised and overwhelmed. Allowing them to focus on what needs to done.
• Another way to handle pressure is by fixing perception. How your athlete perceives a situation can change how they respond to it. They can perceive pressure as a “challenge or threat”.
• The mind and body will respond according to how your athlete perceives pressure. Challenge mindset will release a certain set of hormones while a threat mindset will have its own set of hormones and changes in the body.
• Emotions are also different when looking at things as a challenge vs threat. We must think of emotions as a symptom of our perception. If your athlete has negative emotions, look at how they view the situation.
• Lastly, providing a safe space for your athlete can help them handle pressure. This means allowing your kid not to fear what will happen off the field. They need to know that they can put it all on the field and it will remain there. If mistakes happen, they should not have to hear about it on the way home and at dinner. That is what practices and trainings are for, to address mistakes and how to eliminate them. Home should be a safe space away from sports. An athlete that doesn’t have a safe space will think about that and may become overwhelmed.

Full Transcript

Hey, David Sabi here with Kid to Athlete. We're going over pressure, specifically on how to help your kid not buckle or break under it.

So why do kids break or buckle under pressure? One of the biggest reasons I think from experiences of coaching kids and talking to other coaches, I believe one of the biggest reasons is overwhelm. The kids are becoming overwhelmed when that time really counts, right? And so what you're looking at is they're being overwhelmed. And overwhelmed can be basically cut into two categories. They're overwhelmed first by too many thoughts. Some are relevant, some are irrelevant. Those irrelevant thoughts are just distractions. They're distracting them from focusing on what they actually need to be focusing on. And some of those irrelevant thoughts could be, what is the coach thinking? What is the crowd thinking? I didn't wear my lucky socks. And so they are distracted by all these other irrelevant thoughts. The second way that your kid can be overwhelmed when pressure's on is by simply overthinking and it can be overthinking on little movements, big movements.

Let's take a golfer for example. A golfer is up for a putt. It's the winning putt, right? They make this, they win the tournament. And so when they get up to putt, they're thinking too many things, they're overthinking a movement that they should know how to do. They're thinking of weight distribution, soft bend in the knees. I got to be at a right angle rotation, grip the club a certain way. Don't grip it too tight. Breathe with your diaphragm. Inhale and exhale through the nose, shoulder... All these things, they start overthinking and it overwhelms them when they are under pressure. So how can we help prevent or decrease that chance of being overwhelmed? First one, I believe is visualization, visualization work, mental work is really what you're working on is allowing your athlete to focus on and visualized those times under pressure. When you're doing this work, you can imagine being under pressure. Imagine the crowd. Imagine the coaches screaming and start to focus in and hone in on what really needs to be focused on.

Start to learn to cut off all those distractions and just focus and basically meditate on what you need to really pay attention to. And so visualization work is one of the best things you can do. It also allows your athlete to kind of put themselves in those situations without really being in the situation. So they have a lot of control and it's a little bit more comfortable. The second thing I would recommend is help your kid with their perception. And I first got this from Captain Tom Chaby who was a former Navy Seal guy. And he said, "If you perceive things as a challenge, you're going to react differently. If you perceive it as a threat, you're going to react differently." And when we talked about you're going to react differently, I'm not just talking about you just think about it differently.

Your body actually goes into a whole nother system, right? It starts, the hormones that are pumped up. The endocrine system is functioning differently, the nervous system is functioning differently. And so when you perceive it, and this is just mental again, if you perceive it as a challenge, you're going to react differently than if you perceive it as a threat. Now, under pressure, when your athlete is looking at something more as a challenge, they're more likely to attack it and they're more likely to kind of focus in on what is needed. If they're perceiving it as a threat, they're going to be one, they're going to start thinking those irrelevant thoughts, getting overwhelmed by those distractions and they'll probably start to overthink things. So make sure you can help your kid perceive things as a challenge. And just a side note, I want to go into, when you're perceiving things as a challenge versus a threat, emotions are different.

A lot of times you hear emotions is a sign of weakness, especially in sports. And I just want to say it is not a sign of weakness. Maybe being able to control those emotions is a weakness, but those emotions might just be a symptom of how you're perceiving things. Because think about the emotions that you'll have when you think of it as a challenge versus when you think of it as a threat. So don't attack the emotions if your athlete is or kid is feeling all these emotions and you're, hey, that's not the emotions I want. Don't look at the emotions, look at how they're perceiving it. Just a side note, don't think of emotions as a sign of weakness, right? Let's go into perception first. So that's number two, perceiving things as the challenge.

Number three would be to provide a safe space. When you provide a safe space for your kid, they understand that they will be okay off the field or out of the pool or off the court or wherever, whatever they're doing right? And so when they see that they can be okay after putting it all on the field, because we always talk about, put it all on the field. But if they put it all on the field is whatever happens, they're going to continue with them, right? So they're putting it all on the field for a reason. If they make a mistake, they need to know and understand that they're going to be okay off the field. When that happens, guess what? They don't have to think about that, which going back to overwhelm, they won't be thinking about that when the time comes to really focus in on, let's say that that shot they got to make to win the game.

So make sure that you allow your athletes to understand they have a safe space once they get off the field, that they can put it all on the field and they'll be okay. So my three ways of helping your athlete reduce the overwhelmed so they don't break or buckle is first visualization, start working with visualization work. I've got a video that kind of goes with that. Two, is making sure they perceive things as a challenge, not a threat. And then the last one, is safe space. Provide your athlete with a safe space. Again, I'll have a video for that as well. But when they have all three of those and they're working on it, they're more likely to perform and focus on what they need to under pressure. I believe kids can handle a lot of pressure, but what happens is they become overwhelmed and that's where they break.

So I hope this video helps you. Again, check out my other videos. If you are looking for a little bit more on the visualization, the video I have is also just kind of diving into how you can help them start the mental work, but you as a parent can help. And then provide your athlete with a safe space, telling you it will help a ton. Thanks for watching. My name is David Sabi again, here with Kid to Athlete to help you raise happy, healthy, high-performing athletes. And if you haven't already, hit that Subscribe button, give this video a thumbs up if you like it and I'll see you on the next one.