Helping Young Athletes Deal With Anger - Handling Emotions

Summary

• Young athletes will go through every emotion imaginable. The goal is not to avoid the emotions, it’s to know how to work with them.
• I like to look at emotions as a form of energy. Help your kid learn to control it and they may be able to use it in their sports.
• Anger is a negative and very destructive emotion. Is this a bad thing? It depends on what is being destroyed.
• If anger is destroying your young athlete’s self-esteem, confidence, or happiness then anger is very bad. However, if it’s destroying laziness or excuses then anger can be a good thing.
• We don’t want our athletes to be in this negative emotion for long. Positive actions need to be taken and acknowledged. This will allow them to move out of the negative emotion and into a more positive emotion.
• Helping your child set goals and visualize the events that lead up to it can help deal with emotions. The events, or “story”, will have good times and bad times. When your athlete expects the bad times, it will be easier to know that it’s part of the story. They will need to be strong and find a way to push through.
• Anger is not an emotion or energy that I want young athletes to be in. So know 1) Why they are angry 2) What their ultimate goal is 3) What they can do to improve or get back on track.
• As parents, we must acknowledge any positive action steps and successes from a negative situation. Our goal should not be to eliminate or avoid any emotions. It should be to help them handle any emotion that comes along.

Full Transcript

Hey, David Sabi here with Kid to Athlete, helping parents raise an athlete. Today, we're talking about emotions because if your kid plays sports, your kid's going to go through every emotion that you can think of. One of those emotions, the one I want to talk about today, is anger.

Now, anger is a negative emotion. It's a destructive emotion. But the real question is, is that a bad thing? The answer? It depends. Depends on a couple of things. What are you really destroying? Are you destroying or is your kid destroying their self-esteem, their confidence, their happiness? Because if that's what's being destroyed, you definitely don't want your kid to be angry.

Now, if your kid is angry and they're destroying their laziness, their excuses, their being contented just being average, then great. Then you can use it. Now, you don't want your kid to be feeling their whole performance or sports career on anger. But if they're going to be angry, let's try to get them to move into using positive actions and more positive emotion.

So, for example, your kid is playing sports and they don't perform well, they know they can do better, and now they're angry because they got beat and whatever they were doing. Well, use that to destroy those excuses. Use that anger to destroy excuses. That way they can start to train either harder, smarter, recover better. They're going to start learning to eat better. Use that energy to get them to do positive things.

From there, as parents, your job is really to just acknowledge really their moves in a positive direction. Yes, anger is a negative emotion; however, their actions still need to be positive. Because what you're trying to do is get them from that negative emotion out into and using a positive emotion. You don't want them to be stuck in an angry state. You want them to be in a more positive one. But if they are angry, again, I'm not trying to eliminate emotions. I'm just saying if they're angry, use that destructive energy to destroy things like laziness or excuses. But make sure as a parent you know why they're angry, what their ultimate goal is, as well as what they could be doing as a positive step toward their goal.

Now, in a previous video, I talk about goal setting. When you're going with goals, you want to picture your goals, accomplishing something big, like winning the World Series or something like that. So let's say you've got this picture of you winning the World Series. Make sure they think of everything up to it like a movie. Remember, every movie has good times and bad times. Let's say you've got a movie about an athlete. Everything is just hunky-dory until he gets to the World Series and wins the game. It's not a very good story.

You're going to come across obstacles. Your athlete knows that. Remember, if they're prepared and they know that those obstacles are coming up and mentally they know when they hit these times where they're angry or hit these times where they're like, "Hey, I'm not performing well," then they can take a look at it and think, "This is just part of the story. Let's take this anger or this negative energy, use it in a positive way so that we can get out of it, get over the obstacle, and then move on to a more positive emotion or energy so that we can continue on our path to the World Series," or whatever sport or goal you have.

Then from there, make sure that you acknowledge when they are taking those action steps and they're taking those positive steps because that's going to help fuel them as well and get them out of that negative emotion and that anger into a more positive emotion.

So again, hopefully that helps. If you haven't already, hit that subscribe button, and I will see you on the next one.