What If? — The Question
What if your child’s soccer performance, development rate, or school grades are not associated with their knowledge? What if it’s a confidence issue?
What if? Perspective
What if we have missed the obvious, that how you think and how you feel is directly related to how you will act? We are all wired as emotional creatures. Children are often seen as not dealing with many of the major issues that plague adults such as depression, and anxiety (more specifically performance anxiety).
It’s my belief that children deal with it more than adults. They have not been taught how to recognize and navigate feelings effectively. It’s for this reason I believe our players are over coached and under performing.
What if? The Solution
I recommend we see our children and players as a personality or a confidence number. We are all who we are from a personality standpoint. If you can understand the pros and cons of a player’s personality, and coach the personality; then your success rate will drastically improve.
The one size fits all coaching style is simply not effective and leaves too many children behind. We ask players to conform to our coaching style, which is really saying we want to be treated in a way that’s suitable to our personality. How hypocritical is this approach? We ask the child to do what the adult isn’t capable of. In many cases the adult is a paid professional.
What If?
We see our players as a confidence number on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest). Knowing that true development, execution and high level performance only truly happens above the number 8. Then we can coach the confidence as the priority and plant the seed that will give us the fruit we are looking for. One may ask what fruits? Fruits such as hard work, toughness, grit, vision, high level communication, dynamic mobility etc.