The Essential First Steps You Need To Take To Help Your Daughter Develop Confidence In Her Sport

back to the racing unstoppable girl athletes podcast. I'm your host, Bree and elite competitor coach for female athletes. And I am so glad that you're here. Whether you are a sports mom with lots of seasons under your belt, you're just getting started or somewhere in between. This podcast is for you to help your daughter believe in herself as much as you do and build that confidence in her, in her sport and in her life. Now, before we get into today's episode, all about the essential first steps that you can be taking right now to help set your daughter up for confidence. In her sports. I have a favor to ask. In order to get this podcast into the ears of as many female athletes and their moms as possible. It really helps us out if you rate and review the podcast. So if you enjoyed this episode or any one of the other ones that we have done, go ahead and just give us a rate review and share with a fellow sports mom that really helps us out. And it also allows us to bring on valuable guests to help serve you. So thank you. Thank you in advance for doing that for us. Now let's kick off this episode with a shout"out from our community. I want to quickly recognize one of the moms in our community. She's actually going through the elite competitor program right now. That's our signature mental training program for female athletes. And her name is Priscilla. Her daughter plays soccer and Priscilla posted this the other day in our private group. She said,"My daughter and I have completed two weeks of the training so far, she's played in two games this weekend and yesterday's was a state cup game. I can honestly say I saw zero issues with her mindset. It was such an improvement. It's such an improvement that I could actually notice that she needs to work on some agility. We had a great post game. Talk about this. And this morning we did a little workout to start addressing it. She was actually up and ready before me to put in the work. I think she's starting to believe that she can be confident in herself while also striving to improve." No, this is so cool because two things are happening here. Priscilla's daughter is working on implementing what she is learning in the program. She is working on her mindset. She's working on what she can control. And really focusing on the process out there, she is implementing those tools and then Priscilla, herself has been working on her post game routine. So what to say to her daughter after she competes and when these two things come together, like they have right here, it's a pretty special thing. So nice shot Priscilla, really proud of you. Keep it going. All right. Today, we are talking about the essential first steps that you can be taking to ensure your daughter has confidence. In her sports, which will also transfer over to her life. Now, again, whether your daughter has been playing for a long time, or she's just starting off, this is kind of like a checklist that I want you to go through as a sports mom to see, Hey, where am I at with this? Am I doing these things? Do I need to improve in certain areas? And I hope that this is a really helpful guide for you to help know, you know, am I building this really strong foundation for my daughter, for her? To develop confidence. Now let's first talk about what confidence is. Our definition of confidence is trusting yourself. So athletes who can trust themselves are the ones who can go out and know that no matter what happens out there in their athletic experience, mistakes failures. Coaching issues. Teammate issues, whatever it is, they have confidence knowing that they can navigate any of these experiences. This also means that they trust their feelings. They trust their experiences. They trust their emotions. And that is at the root of what confidence is. Confident athletes can go out. Guaranteeing that they're going to win. Confidence is not winning all the time. Confidence is not actually feeling good. All of the time. Confidence is not ever making mistakes. Confidence is that athletes can navigate these things. They can face loss, they can face failures, they can face mistakes and they can still come out on the other side stronger and keep going. Athletes who lack confidence really are afraid of these things. They think failure is probably the worst thing that can happen to them. They're really wondering what other people are thinking of them. They're not rooted in their own trust and their own self-belief. And these athletes go out on to their competition field feeling really, really scared and really hesitant. You might not be able to see it from the outside sometimes. Some of you will, some of you want, all right, but going on the inside. That's where we see athletes struggling with this anxiety, this pregame. Nervousness that becomes too much. Now in order for athletes to play with confidence and play to their potential in their sport, we use what we call the elite performance formula, elite performance formula. And this requires three things. It really hinges on three things, and we need all three of these in order for your athlete to play to her potential and play with confidence. And they are number one, she needs to have physical training. And that one, we pretty easily checked the box in. Right. It's. It's not hard to get our daughters to practice and find all these physical training opportunities because they're abundant. But yep. We still need us. Okay. And then the second thing we need is knowledge of the sport. So as your daughter gets further, along in her sport, she will start to understand more about her sports. So we're talking like the technical strategies, the tactical strategies. All of those things, help your daughter play to her potential. And the third piece is mental training, and this is where the bulk of her confidence will come from. This is where she learns how to navigate these very normal experiences of being an athlete. And like I said, this is a formula. They all multiply each other. So I'm even think of it. Like physical training multiplied by knowledge of the sport multiplied by mental training equals a competent athlete. Who's playing to her potential. And when any one of these increases, so we up the physical training, maybe we get her more quality reps. She is going to increase her knowledge of the sport. And she's going to feel more confident. Her mental training is going to improve a little bit because with competence she's getting better at our sport comes confidence. Yes. That will improve. We see also when athletes improve their mental training, when they know how to handle nerves, pressure come back from mistakes. They also improve in their physical game and then they improve them the knowledge of the sport. So you see they all they'll amplify one another. However the opposite is true as well. What happens in a multiplication problem when you multiply anything by zero. Well, the whole thing is zero. Right? So if we are lacking in any one of these areas, we know if we don't, if you're not. I'm putting the physical training. She can believe all she wants that she's she's good or swear. She hasn't put it in the rough. She's never going to reach her potential. Like we know that the same also goes with mental training. And this is the area that often gets overlooked. If she doesn't know how to come back from mistakes. If she lets the pre-game. We're just pre-practice anxiety and nerves take over and she can't play at her potential. She will never reach that level of a confident athlete. Who's performing to her potential. And so at most she might be like, okay, are pretty good at her sport. But at worst, if she doesn't have these skills of confidence, she might end up walking away from the sport that she loves, which was my story. If you know anything about my story, you know, she can be physically talented, but if she doesn't believe in herself, And then that talent will never reach its potential. And so that's why we really want to make sure that we are honing in on the mental side of the game. And I'm sure you've heard before that people talk about like, you know, sports are 90% mental and 10% physical, but how much do we spend on the mental aspect of the game? Not very much, and that's why we exist because we want to change that. We want to provide tools for athletes to be able to work on this super important part of the game. Because any athlete at any level faces these very similar things. You'll talk to, you know, I talked to you very young athletes that are starting out and then Olympic level athletes who are competing at the highest level. They all face feelings of doubt, feelings of uncertainty, they all face pressure. In fact, the higher your daughter gets up in her sport, the more pressure she's going to feel. And so that's why we want to give her those skills to handle that. Not just hope that she figures it out when she gets there, because she won't, if she doesn't have the skills, it's just like any other. Any other spiritual skill mental training is a skill that needs to be developed. Okay. So knowing that let's go into the first essential first steps that you can be taking to help ensure that your daughter is developing this part of the game. So the first one. First one is know your role. No your role. And if you've been to any one of our trainings, You've heard this before. And what we know to be true is that there are four main roles in your athlete, daughters. Athletic experience. There is the athlete, the coach, the ref, and the parent. Right. And you get to be one of them. Now, if you are the actual coach of your daughter's team, that's a little bit of a different story. We, we talk about that inside our private group as well. And you get to play to two roles. Now it's really important that you not only know your role, but stay in your role. So you are not the athlete anymore. Sometimes I know some of us that are former athletes and we all want the best for our kids. And so we have these expectations that we need to check. Okay. We need to check in with ourselves. Is this what my daughter wants? Or is this what I want? So this is your athlete. Daughter's experience, not yours anymore. Okay. So you're not the athlete, you're not the coach. This is where we, we tend to kind of creep into the coach side. Right? We want to give her tips. We want to help. We want to tell her what we saw, because we think it's really going to help, which it might, but if she is not open and willing to receive, it actually makes things worse. And, you know, at worst it confuses your daughter and it kind of pits you against the coach. If you're giving conflicting information, she doesn't need reminders from you. She doesn't need tips. She doesn't need any of that. She needs you to be the parent. Right. The parent now you're not the RAF either. Don't be that mom or dad that's on the sideline. Like. You know, yelling at the refs. I think I hopefully we're past that, but you are the parent and your job as the parent is two main things. You shaped the environment and you provide the opportunities. Yeah. I like to think about building confidence is less like building a house where it's like a foundation. And then, you know, all these structures that build on each other and more like cultivating a garden. Right. So you are cultivating, you are shaping the environment for your daughter. All right. And that happens by how you show up, how you talk about yourself. Because again, if you've been to one of our trains, you know that what you say a lot about yourself actually influences your daughter's confidence a lot. It becomes her inner voice. So how are you modeling confidence? How are you talking to her? Right. What is your. W what are your verbal. Verbal cues before, during and after games. You know, because where we, where we emphasize our praise and where we emphasize our recognition is really important. So you shape the environment for her, and then you provide the opportunities as well. So you provide the physical training, you provide the mental training and that's kind of like a garden you're kind of cultivating the soil, which is like the environment you're giving the other opportunities. So that's like maybe the fertilizer or the water so that she can grow in this confidence. And that is your role. All right. Your role is to. To be that for her. Right to provide that opportunity and to be the example for her. So that's the first thing that you can be doing right away is just know your role and stay in your role. Great. Okay, second thing. Is like I was talking about just a second ago, provide the opportunities for your daughter to develop confidence. It is as part of our jobs as moms to provide the opportunity for her to develop. This part of her game. And if you've heard that quote before I just heard it again recently, that was, we don't want to shape the path for our kids. We want to shape our kids for the path. We don't want to just be removing obstacles in our daughter's way, all the time in her sport. In fact, we can't remove all the obstacles. There's going to be potentially conflicts with teammates, you know, maybe a disagreement with a coach. Who's going to be all of these things that are going to be in your daughter's path as an athlete. Which is good. That's why we want her to play sports, right. Because it's just a, such a great breeding ground for all of these. Opportunities for her to face adversity. And when we're coming in and we're like fixing things and we're taking things out of her path, we are robbing her the opportunity to be able to face these, these challenges and develop the confidence that she needs to come out on the other end better. And so you have to provide her with the opportunity to develop this part of her game. Like I was saying earlier, confidence is a skill. These are skills. We actually teach these skills inside the elite competitor program. They are just like any other physical skill. We can't just hope that our athletes are going to somehow pick them up with another level of play or a new coach, or as she gets older. In fact. The higher, she goes up in her sport, the more that's going to be required of her, not less. And so for like, oh, she's just going to be confident when she gets to that next level. We're in trouble, right? Because she's going to need that confidence before she gets there. That's like if I were to. You know, just send my kids into the deep end without giving them any swimming lessons. It's like, oh, hope you hope you figure it out. No, we don't want that. We want to teach them how to swim before we put them in those difficult situations. And so that's why it's part of our responsibility to ensure our athlete daughters have. These tools and these skills to navigate. Like I said, the very normal parts of being an athlete. You know, how does she handle pressure? How does she handle. When she doesn't get what she wants. How does she prepare for games? You know, all of these things, how does she come back from mistakes? Does she have tangible skills that she can lean on to be able to develop this part of her game? And if she doesn't, she is going to be beat out by athletes. I do. All right. That's just the reality. She. You know, athletes have a competitive advantage. If they know how to come back quickly from mistakes athletes who know how to handle the pressure and the nerves. Of what they're about to face. Have a competitive advantage. Athletes who know how to shift their self talk away from this negative spiral thinking, have a competitive advantage. Athletes, you don't get stuck in this. Negative mindset of only seeing the bad things that they did in a game and not recognizing the good, have a competitive advantage. And the athletes who have moms and parents who know how to respond in these moments also have a competitive advantage. Right. So if you know what to say to your daughter before, during and after games in a way that will help her develop confidence, you are giving your daughter a competitive advantage, right along with confidence that she can use in her sport and in life. So that's why it's really important that we provide opportunities for your daughter. And if you want just a really a good overview of how you can start this, go check out our free training. It's at trainhergame.com. That's where we go over the whole methodology that we use to help you build confidence in your athlete daughter. So that's at trainhergame.com. Okay. So we've gone over the first steps. The. The number one first step. And this is, we have three. Okay. Number one is know your role senior role, right? You are the parent. You provide the opportunities, you shape the environment. Number two, make sure you are providing her the opportunities. It's not a sink or swim situation here. Okay. She's probably not going to swim. If you don't give her the skills to be able to do that. And number three. And this is one, that's more of a long game, but you can be starting this right now is shift where you are giving your recognition in your praise. Okay. Now there are some unintended consequences of praise. Hey, and we need to be very intentional where we are. Placing our recognition when it comes to our athlete daughters. Outcomes and what she's doing in her sport. It's very easy for us to focus on the outcomes because they're the most easily seen. So I'm going to say outcomes. I mean, the things that are sports that are. You know, outwardly seem like. Goals scored. Her stats. You know, the number of kills she got in a game, like all of these outcomes wins losses. Those are all outcomes. They're the easiest thing to recognize because in sports it's like what is like visually right in front of us. Okay. And here's the deal. When we are only focusing on outcomes, right? And even when we overly praise outcomes, and we just only recognize outcomes, our daughters get the subconscious message that their self worth their identity, their confidence. Is rooted in their outcomes, their performance. And here's the problem with that. Their outcomes are actually not in their control. I'm like, wait, what? She can influence her outcomes, but at the end of the day, winning, losing the number of points she's scoring that is actually out of her control because there's so many other factors that go into it. Right. There's the other team there's coaching decisions. There's teammates. There's like the, the nature of whatever is happening in the game that day or that competition. Right. So those are actually out of our control. So if she is now feeling like she has to control something, that's out of her control. That's where that extra pressure comes in. And so for those of you that are saying, like, I hear this all the time, my daughter puts this extra pressure on herself. I only tell her that she's doing a good job, you know, and, and she's just has all this pressure on her. We need to look at where we are focusing on recognition, focusing our praise. So something simple that you can do is shift to what is the process. That's in her control that got her that outcome. Right. So maybe she had an amazing game or she got like a career number of kills or stats or whatever. Okay. Let's shift to. All right. That's great. Right. We're not gonna just ignore it. That's great. I am so impressed and so proud. And so inspired by how much work you put in every single day to get there. How you really wanted that. I'm really impressed with how hard you worked, even when it was hard to get that. In the game. I noticed that it could have been easy for you to give up, right. It could have been easy to not be a good teammate, but you were, I saw you making eye contact with the coach taking coaching. I saw you helping your teammates when it was You know, when you guys were down. So all of these things that are in her control, her attitude, her effort, her way, that she prepares, right. Her ability to take coaching, her ability to be a good teammate. All of those things are in her control. And so the more that we can focus on those things that are in control, the more confidence your athlete's going to have the, if now she's like, Hey, I can do that. I can be a good teammate. That's in my control. I can work really hard. That's all I, you know, I do that every day. I can work really hard. And less on, I have to get this number of goals. I have to get these steps, you know, it's good for them to have goals and have visions of where they want to go. We see that. But then we also want to go back to what's right in front of us and that's process. All right. And so that's really important, a really important long game thing. To help your daughter develop that deep confidence in her sport, but then also in her life so that she's not going out into the work force or, you know, whatever she wants to do for a career. And she's tying all of these like performance things to herself worth. Right. We want our daughters to know that they are worthy regardless of their outcome, regardless of their performance. They are worthy. Right. So. All right. Moms. I had to kind of wrap up these essential first steps and you can kind of judge, you know, where am I at? My, my, my hitting all three of these. Am I one out of three? Do I need to work on some of these? And this is not. To shame or anything. This is too, I hope you feel empowered by like, oh, right. Okay. We can take some first steps. So first one is to know your role and stay in your role. Second. It's to provide her the opportunities to develop her confidence. Third shift, where you were giving her recognition and your praise. So focus on these three things as essential first steps. If you want to go a little bit deeper, go check out our free training for sports mom. That's a trainhergame.com that will help you with a really specific foundation. Like a step-by-step thing on what you can do to help build her confidence as well. All right, moms, I am coach Bree. This is your go-to podcast to raise your unstoppable girl athlete. Remember to rate and review, to get the salads into the hands of as many families as possible. And I will see you in the next episode.