Speaker 0: 0:00

Welcome back to the Raising Elite Competitors podcast. I'm Coach Brie, a mental performance coach for girl athletes, and I am so excited that you are here. Whether you are just beginning your sports journey with your athlete or you have a lot of seasons under your belt, this podcast is for you to help you know how to raise a confident and mentally strong girl athlete. We are gonna dive into today's episode right away because I have some listener questions that I'm answering. I kind of grouped some together and I thought it'd be a good opportunity just to grab some of the questions that we're seeing in our community and also some questions that we're seeing on our live trainings that we're doing right now for sports moms and answer them on the podcast. And if you haven't already registered or joined us for one of our live trainings, if you're listening to this at the time of recording, towards the mid to end of September we are hosting live trainings for sports moms, all about the do's and the don'ts of strengthening your athlete daughter's mental game. So if you haven't already registered, you could head to trainhergamecom. That's where you can grab your registration link. It is totally free and we don't do these live trainings super often. In fact, these are the last live trainings that we will do for 2024. So 24. So if you're listening to this at the time of recording, go ahead and go to trainhergamecom and schedule your date and time. We have a few to choose from.

Speaker 0: 1:13

Okay, so the first question that I get asked around mental training is what is the best age to start mental training for my daughter? She is 12. I'm not sure if that's too young, okay. So great question. We have a lot of parents of a lot of different ages of athletes that are coming through our program, which is the Elite Mental Game. Our program and the work that we do is for athletes aged 11 to 18. And we actually see that 11 to 12 is the prime age of when athletes are really grasping and understanding the concept of mental training and it's also when they're typically the most open to it. Right around they get to 11 and 12. And that is because they're starting to compete at higher levels. Maybe they're moving from middle school to high school. So around 12 into 13, they're starting to have some physical changes happen to their bodies, which can sometimes plummet a girl athlete's confidence because, as they should, they're gaining weight, they're getting taller and it's impacting their gross motor skills, and so then they're starting to have some thoughts about why this is happening and that they don't like it. They also, at this age, start to compare a little bit more, and they're experiencing more of the normal parts of athletics, which are comparison is one of them. But coming back from mistakes, dealing with pressure, like the expectations, are just starting to get a little bit more, especially if your athlete is at the competitive level, and so we find that 11 to 12 is actually a really good time to start this work, and we work with athletes all the way up to 18.

Speaker 0: 2:34

I will say that mental training should be introduced like as young as it can. My kids my own personal kids when they're five and six, we start talking about their breath goal setting. When my own personal kids, when they're five and six, we start talking about their breath goal setting. When I say their breath, and when you're nervous, you're feeling the butterflies, you can use your breath as a tool to help calm the butterflies. Goal setting, visualization, the power of self talk, like all of those things can kind of be introduced pretty young, and then, around 11 to 16, they're ready for a more formal mental training, so something like the elite mental game, which is our signature mental training program for girl athletes, or something similar, where they're actually learning the tools and understanding what's going on in their bodies and in their brains when they're competing and how to use that for good. Now, if they are the ages of 16 plus 17, 18, like mental training actually should be part of their routine. If it's not, then they're likely being outperformed by athletes of similar ability who do know how to come back for mistakes faster than they do and do prepare well for games and can handle the pressure. So all of those things are what the best athletes are doing. Like you hear it even on the biggest stages with the Olympics just happening this summer, how important the mental game is and what athletes are telling themselves and saying to themselves and how essential that is to how they're showing up.

Speaker 0: 3:42

So if your athlete is on the older end, like she's a junior senior or she's in college and she has goals and she wants to play well, then mental training should be a part of what she does. That is definitely a time to make sure that she has the tools and has the skills. So, in short, 11 to 12 is like a good starting age. We do have athletes that are younger. We just want to make sure that if you are going through our program at a younger age, that the parent is doing the program with them in a sense, so they're making sure that their athlete's tracking along, and the beautiful part about our program is that it grows with athletes. Even if your athlete is younger when they're coming in, she might not be able to apply all of the things that she is learning, so you might want to skip over some of those. However, she will eventually and that will always be there for her. We also have in-season, out-of-season, pre-season, post-season, like all of the support inside the program. So athletes are constantly utilizing the content and the material as they go throughout their sport season, their year and as they get older.

Speaker 0: 4:35

Okay, the next question that I received that would be a good one to bring on the podcast is are there any signs that I should be aware of that my athlete might be struggling with the? She might be a good candidate to start mental training Now. Who will? So I think this is a great question, but I believe that everybody every athlete should have the tools to navigate the normal parts of being an athlete. It's not okay. Well, if you're struggling, then you gotta get some mental training in there. It's pretty cool now that when I was playing in college, we had access to sports psychology resources and we had these tools. And now my athletes who are playing in at the collegiate level they're telling me like they have a sports psychologist on their staff, which is amazing.

Speaker 0: 5:18

We don't. You don't have to wait until you're in college to have resources like this. Athletes have access to resources like this in middle school and in high school. That's why we do what we do, and so it's not like, okay, we're going to wait until she's struggling and then we'll give her mental training. I mean, yes, that helps and that works and it's great that she has the resources. But the best is when we can preload this, that we can prepare athletes with skills so that when they get into a situation where they're making a mistake and they're spiraling, or they're down by a few points and they're digging themselves into a hole, they know how to get out and they can navigate the disappointment, they can navigate the pressure, they can navigate the mistakes, like all of those things are guaranteed to happen to her, and so we want to equip athletes with the skills to be able to navigate them before they actually are flailing in the deep end of the pool, because we threw them in there and they didn't have the skills to be able to swim and so we want to. I mean, that's like best case scenario, okay.

Speaker 0: 6:10

But if you are starting to notice some signs in your athlete like she is coming off of the court of the field and she can only focus on like the one to two things that she does wrong, those are magnified more than the other million things that she did, right, okay. Or maybe she is spiraling after mistakes. She just has a really hard time and she digs herself into holes, feels like nothing is ever good enough. She Feels like nothing is ever good enough. She's hesitating. You're like, wow, she's actually not playing as good as she could be, because I've seen her play better and she's just hesitating out there. Maybe she plays better in practices than in games, right. These are all signs that her mental game does need some work, okay. So if you are looking for signs, yes, those would be some of them.

Speaker 0: 6:46

However, a lot of athletes that come into our program are actually in it because they want lifelong confidence for their athletes. They want to teach their athletes these skills of confidence, because they know that it's not just their sport that it's impacting, it's everything else. A sport is just a mirror to how they're handling the challenges of their daily life too. And we have moms who are saying like if she's not advocating for herself in her sport, she's probably not going to advocate for herself outside of her sport she's probably going to get take advantage of, and if she's not taking risks in her sport, she's probably not going to take that risk or believe in herself that she could go after that scholarship or that job. And so they're investing not just in the performance right, it's more than just her performance, because you have her in sports for more than just that. I assume, it's for her life. And so these are it's more than just a program that helps her with all of these things. So the parents in our program are really investing in their athlete holistically. So but to recap, I can't answer that question.

Speaker 0: 7:36

If you are starting to notice some of those signs that I talked about, you know, only focusing on one, two things that she did wrong, so that perfectionism spiraling after mistakes, not being able to come back, maybe she's hesitating and just kind of playing like a shell of herself out there. Those are signs that her mental game is to blame for some of that and she needs some skills to navigate it Okay. The other thing, though, I want to mention about that is if your athlete has goals she has goals of making a certain team, she has goals of playing at a certain level, even if she has goals of like I want to have fun, I want to be connected to my teammates and I want to have a good season. We sometimes fall into this trap of once she gets to that next level, then she'll feel more confident. Then she will be able to play at a better level, whatever that is. We kind of fall into this trap of like then it'll happen when she has this coach or this team or that, and that Okay. The truth of it is that the opposite is actually true. So once she gets that next level, then the more will be required of her, not less. So it's not like okay, once we make that team, then the pressure will be off. No, she's going to have more pressure. The leash is going to be a little shorter.

Speaker 0: 8:37

As somebody who has played through college Like, I know that the higher that I went on the club teams and all of that. The more that was expected of me and the less room there was for me to have a lot of errors or a lot of mistakes. I had to be able to come back faster. So you want to make sure that, especially if your athlete is communicating that she has goals, playing at another level or performing at some other level that's higher than what she is right now, that we want to make sure she has skills to meet the demands of that level as well. I will also mention what are your goals for her, and I don't mean, yeah, you want her to play in college or you want her to do this and that, as I was mentioning before, like, really, what experience do you want her to have as a result of all of this time and money and investment that you're putting into athletics and mental training is kind of like an insurance policy on all of that. You're already investing a whole heck of a lot into it, and so now we're just ensuring that she's going to be able to get out as much as, if not more than, what you put in, not just physically, but also these skills that are transferring beyond the court and the field. Okay, good question, let's see.

Speaker 0: 9:36

Number three question that I had submitted recently and somebody asked this on the training too is how quickly can you start to see results when starting mental training? Okay, this makes a lot of sense too, because it's like well, okay, say, we do some sort of mental training, how fast can I start to see some changes? I can't speak to all of the other mental training resources that might be out there, but for us and our program we see results within the first week because athletes are doing what is called the snapback routine within phase one of our program. So our program is broken up into five phases. Phase one is the snapback routine. That's where they learn their custom routine to help them come back from mistakes within seconds. And so we teach athletes how to develop this routine, how to use it, how to implement it into practice and how to implement it into the game. And we do this intentionally. We put up the very beginning of the program because athletes get quick wins from it and they start to see like, oh, this works, and then that engages them to go through the rest of the program. So that is something right away. Athletes are seeing the of they constantly. That's one of the top things on the surveys at the end of the program that we find athletes are saying like the snapback routine is one of the tools that I use all the time. So within the first week, if athletes are following the program, we're starting to see results. Now, as they continue to go through, our program is literally a game. So they earn points and prizes. So it's motivated in that way and it's very short training.

Speaker 0: 10:54

I was a teacher for 10 years so I bring a lot of this educational background. We know that the attention spans of most adolescents are very short, so we keep the trainings very quick, easy to consume and applicable to their lives and their sport. So as they're starting to just consume these little nuggets of trainings, they're starting to apply them and, as a result, they are seeing results and starting to apply them and, as a result, they are seeing results and a lot of them are very tangible. You know there are techniques that they can use before they go out and compete. It's awareness techniques as well. So when they're starting to notice that they're bumped out of their flow state or something's kind of rattling them, they have a tool to come back. So they're going through all five of these phases and if athletes are following our training plan, they get through all five phases within about three months. But that's only going at a pace of about 30 minutes a week. So a lot of athletes go a little bit faster than that. So, yeah, very fast results if athletes are just tracking along.

Speaker 0: 11:44

Okay, this next question is how do I present mental training to my daughter without making it seem like something is wrong with her? I don't want her to feel like I am saying that she has low confidence or make things worse. Okay, another great question when we get a lot around this whole issue of buy-in right and I totally understand this you don't want to make her feel like, wow, now my mom's noticing I have confidence issues and she's definitely not going to do the program if she's feeling that. So don't tell her. She needs to work on her confidence, and here's one of the tips that we give moms. We actually have a whole conversation guide around this that I will link in the show notes, and in that conversation guide there's sentence starters that can help bring up the conversation.

Speaker 0: 12:25

We also have podcast episodes where I'm just talking about the mental game. So most of our podcast episodes are for you, mom or dad, but I have some that are specifically just for athletes and I have some where I'm interviewing alumni and my athletes who were on our state championship teams talking about the importance of the mental game. So sometimes it's just easier for them to hear from peers, like what the experience is like. That helps them. I had a mom recently say I just put on the podcast that you told me to put on. I left the room, came back and she was in. So sometimes it can be as simple as that.

Speaker 0: 12:51

We also tell moms and dads dads, if you're listening, don't worry, I'm not leaving you out here to connect it to her larger goals. So if she does have goals, like I was saying before, whatever those are connecting it to it. So if you know that she has a goal to play at the next level or she wants to make a certain team, they connected it. So it could sound something like you've dedicated a ton of time to basketball. I can tell you really love it, you really want to go far. I'm here to help and support you and your goals. And because you've said you want to play in college or make the varsity team or whatever, I think that the mental side of the game is something we can hone in on to allow you to reach your goals. Okay, If she's motivated by challenges, something like hey, you said you want to be the best ball handler on your team, the best athletes. We actually have a whole website, too, that's dedicated just for athletes.

Speaker 0: 13:37

If we're talking specifically about the elite mental game, and it helps them understand that, like, the best athletes are the ones that are separating themselves by making sure that they have strong mental games, that they can come back from mistakes, that can deal with pressure, all of those things Okay. So the key here is to connect it to something that they've already stated that they want. Another strategy is to show them examples of other athletes using mental training. So there's a plethora of them right now because of the Olympics. So just find who is an athlete in their life that they look up to maybe not in their immediate life, but that could be useful as well. But someone like a Simone Biles or a Katie Ledecky or a Victoria Garrick, like what's their sport? Who's the person who is kind of in the spotlight for a good reason in their sport.

Speaker 0: 14:16

Find the YouTube videos, the podcast of them speaking about how they became great and talking about the mental game, and 100% they will talk about it. And so find those clips and send them to them and, if you want to bring it closer to home, maybe they do have somebody in their life that they look up to on a little bit of a closer level, somebody who's played in college or is a little bit older than them and bring it up. How is this athlete working on their game? That doesn't involve the physical training, this wedding. How are they working on their game outside of that? Because the best athletes do so. Those are kind of two of the top tips that we use, but check out that conversation guide and we have a lot more tips in there as well. As I mentioned before, these podcast episodes that are just for athletes are really great as well. So you don't have to try and do the convincing. You can just put me on the background and she can listen away.

Speaker 0: 14:58

The other part about it, if you are considering the elite mental game, is to release the burden of trying to get her to buy in right away. So don't underestimate the power of you changing your approach. So part of our program includes the parent. We give parents resources and scripts and strategies to change their approach a little bit in this whole sports journey, and just changing your approach can make a big difference. We talk about that on the free training as well. So trainhergamecom, if you haven't already registered. We talk about your role in all of this. And even you making small shifts and changes impacts the dynamic and helps her become more confident. And then parents who are in that situation just are like, hey, she'll come around and when she does I can enroll her, but for now I'm just going to work on my part and do the work on on my side of it. Yeah, that's what we have for the buy-in. Eventually, athletes, like I will say there's a good success rate when they actually just start the program, even if they just watch the first phase and do their snapback routine. There's a great success rate in that we actually also have a 14 day money back guarantee because of that, because we know sometimes it takes time depending on the readiness of athletes, but most of them, once they get into it, they like it.

Speaker 0: 16:05

Okay, I know this is a quick episode, but I wanted to kind of group some of these questions that I've been getting around. When's the right time to start? How young can you start? What's the typical age range? How to get her to buy in, how quickly can we see results? So hopefully I answered all of your questions, if you have those. But if you do have other questions, feel free to DM me at Elite Competitor Coach on Instagram. You can also shoot us an email at hello at EliteCompetitorcom, and we do some Q&A at the end of each of the live trainings that we're hosting right now towards the mid and end of September. So again, trainhergamecom is where you can go. There you can show up live and you can ask your question there and I will be on chatting away with you. All right, moms, hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you in the next one.